Typography Class

The Typography Class provides functions that help you format text.

Initializing the Class

Like most other classes in CodeIgniter, the Typography class is initialized in your controller using the $this->load->library function:

$this->load->library('typography');

Once loaded, the Typography library object will be available using: $this->typography

auto_typography()

Formats text so that it is semantically and typographically correct HTML. Takes a string as input and returns it with the following formatting:

Surrounds paragraphs within <p></p> (looks for double line breaks to identify paragraphs).
Single line breaks are converted to <br />, except those that appear within <pre> tags.
Block level elements, like <div> tags, are not wrapped within paragraphs, but their contained text is if it contains paragraphs.
Quotes are converted to correctly facing curly quote entities, except those that appear within tags.
Apostrophes are converted to curly apostrophy entities.
Double dashes (either like -- this or like--this) are converted to em—dashes.
Three consecutive periods either preceding or following a word are converted to ellipsis…
Double spaces following sentences are converted to non-breaking spaces to mimic double spacing.

Usage example:

$string = $this->typography->auto_typography($string);

Note: Typographic formatting can be processor intensive, particularly if you have a lot of content being formatted. If you choose to use this function you may want to consider caching your pages.

convert_characters()

nl2br_except_pre()

Converts newlines to <br /> tags unless they appear within <pre> tags. This function is identical to the native PHP nl2br() function, except that it ignores <pre> tags.