Question

Given the following:

$foo = “Yo [user Cobb] I heard you like dreams so I put a dream in yo dream in yo dream so you can dream while you dream while you dream.”

I’d like to do this:

$foo = bar($foo);

echo $foo;

And get something like this:

Yo Cobb I heard you like dreams so I put a dream in yo dream in yo dream so you can dream while you dream while you dream.

I’m unsure of how the bar function should work. I think this is doable with regular expressions but I personally find those hard to understand. Using the strpos function is another method but I wonder if there is a better solution.

Pseudocode is fine but actual code will be appreciated.

Edit:

These tags are not placeholders as the 2nd part is a variable value.

Edit:

All of the str_replace answers are incorrect as the tags contain variable content.

Answer 1

You could use preg_match_all to search the string for tags.

function bar($foo)
{
    $count = preg_match_all("/\[(\w+?)\s(\w+?)\]/", $foo, $matches);
    if($count > 0)
    {
         for($i = 0; $i < $count; $i++)
         {
             // $matches[0][$i] contains the entire matched string
             // $matches[1][$i] contains the first portion (ex: user)
             // $matches[2][$i] contains the second portion (ex: Cobb)

             switch($matches[1][$i])
             {
                 case 'user':
                     $replacement = tag_user($matches[2][$i]);
                     str_replace($matches[0][$i], $replacement, $foo);
                     break;
             }
         }
    }
}

Now you can add more functionality by adding more cases to the switch.