Question

How can I replace a string starting with ‘a’ and ending with ‘z’?

basically I want to be able to do the same thing as str_replace but be indifferent to the values in between two strings in a ‘haystack’.

Is there a built in function for this? If not, how would i go about efficiently making a function that accomplishes it?

Answer 1

$string = "I really want to replace aFGHJKz with booo";
$new_string = preg_replace('/a[a-zA-z]+z/', 'boo', $string);
echo $new_string;

Be wary of the regex, are you wanting to find the first z or last z? Is it only letters that can be between? Alphanumeric? There are various scenarios you’d need to explain before I could expand on the regex.