php/mapscript label question

[Jeff Portwine]

Is there any way to set the "labelitem" to look at a PHP variable rather than an actual attribute in the shapefile for the purpose of labeling?   In my case, I want to overlay route numbers on "sign" symbols.   The Tiger line data has street names shown like "State Highway 10" or whatever and I would like to read that in PHP and change it to just "10".    

I couldn't find any way to do what I want in the documentation so I may be stuck writing a script to go through every county's tiger data adding a column to the .dbf file... but I was hoping to avoid that extra scripting work if I could possibly do so. 

Thanks,
Jeff
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/mapserver-users/attachments/20050331/1d9b2b3f/attachment.html