Question

Do you know of any way to reference an object in the replacement part of preg_replace. I’m trying to replace placeholders (delimited with precentage signs) in a string with the values of attributes of an object. This will be executed in the object itself, so I tried all kinds of ways to refer to $this with the /e modifier. Something like this:

/* for instance, I'm trying to replace
 * %firstName% with $this->firstName
 * %lastName% with $this->lastName
 * etc..
 */
$result = preg_replace( '~(%(.*?)%)~e', "${'this}->{'\\2'}", $template );

I can’t get any variation on this theme to work. One of the messages I’ve been getting is: Can’t convert object Model_User to string.

But of course, it’s not my intention to convert the object represented by $this to a string… I want to grab the attribute of the object that matches the placeholder (without the percentage signs of course).

I think I’m on the right track with the /e modifier. But not entirely sure about this either. Maybe this can be achieved much more simple?

Any ideas about this? Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Like I commented to Paul’s answer: in the meanwhile I found the solution myself. The solution is much more simple than I thought. I shouldn’t have used double quotes.

The solution is as simple as this:

$result = preg_replace( '~(%(.*?)%)~e', '$this->\\2', $template );

Hope this helps anyone else for future reference.

Cheers.