What I've been doing is, for example, just on the parables of Jesus, I manually wrapped all of the verse numbers with <span class="ref"></span>, and then styled them. It's just numbers though, no semi-colons, hyphens, etc.
[text]<p><span class="ref">1</span> On that day Jesus went out of the house, and sat by the seaside. <span class="ref">2</span> Great multitudes gathered to him, so that he entered into a boat, and sat, and all the multitude stood on the beach. <span class="ref">3</span> He spoke to them many things in parables, saying, <span class="red">“Behold, a farmer went out to sow. <span class="ref">4</span> As he sowed, some seeds fell by the roadside, and the birds came and devoured them. <span class="ref">5</span> Others fell on rocky ground, where they didn’t have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, because they had no depth of earth. <span class="ref">6</span> When the sun had risen, they were scorched. Because they had no root, they withered away. <span class="ref">7</span> Others fell among thorns. The thorns grew up and choked them. <span class="ref">8</span> Others fell on good soil, and yielded fruit: some one hundred times as much, some sixty, and some thirty. <span class="ref">9</span> He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”</span></p>[/text]
This is how sites like Bible Gateway and others output there scriptures. I know it would probably be better to use a plug-in to do this instead of having all of these HTML elements stored for each post in the database, but for now, I've just been manually doing it, because my site really isn't about scripture look-ups and things like that. So I wanted to put the text in the form and then have it output something like what I have above, then I would copy and paste it to the Wordpress editor.
It's taken me some time to manually wrap each number with the HTML span tags. But on another note, I wanted to do this to get some practice. I took one little PHP class in college and it was so basic that it was a waste of time really, but for what I do, PHP is very handy to know, so I need practice too.
The function I used in the first post does successfully grab the numbers out of any text that I have tried and gathers them in an array, but I have no idea what to do next
Thank you again!