Question

can we replace all hyphen with blank spaces but if space is followed by hypen and then another space it should not be removed, for example if i get “to-be-or-not – to-be” output should be “to be or not – to be” .is it possible

Answer 1

Assuming $input is your input string, try this:

$output = preg_replace('/([^ ])-([^ ])/', '\\1 \\2', $input);
echo $output; 

The regular expression means one non-space character [^ ], followed by a hyphen and followed by another non-space character, and replace patterns means the first non-space character matched \\1, followed by a space, followed by the second non-space character matched \\2.