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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T16:45:35+00:00

How can I replace all the occurrences of the $keyword within a string without

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How can I replace all the occurrences of the $keyword within a string without replacing the keywords found within the hyperlink URLs, image tag URLs, image tag title and alt tags?

Example:

$keywords = 'sports';

$string = '<a href="http://my_domain_name.com/sports/info.php"><img class="icon" src="http://my_domain_name.com/sports/images/football.gif" title="Get the latest football sports news" alt="Get the latest football sports news" />Football sports news</a>';

Notice that the keyword ‘sports‘ appears with the hyperlink URL, images tag URL, and image tag title and alt tags.

I want to replace $keywords (sports) with:

<span style="color: #000000; background-color: #FFFF00; font-weight: normal;">sports</span>

to yeild the following results:

<a href="http://my_domain_name.com/sports/info.php"><img class="icon" src="http://my_domain_name.com/sports/images/football.gif" title="Get the latest football sports news" alt="Get the latest football sports news" />Football <span style="color: #000000; background-color: #FFFF00; font-weight: normal;">sports</span> news</a>

Thanks in advance.

EDIT – Additional Information

Currently I am using the following 2-step method and it works for just the URLs, and not the title and alt tags. I also need to not replace the keywords in the title and alt tags too.

// Replaces both the website and general images path urls with character strings (used to prevent highlighting keywords found within the path urls)
   if(strpos('http://my_domain_name.com/sports', $keywords) != false) {
     $description = str_ireplace('http://my_domain_name.com/sports', '1q2w3e4r5t6y7u', $description);
   }
   if(strpos('http://my_domain_name.com/sports/images', $keywords) != false) {
     $description = str_ireplace('http://my_domain_name.com/sports/images', '7u6y5t4r3e2w1q', $description);
   }

// Highlights the Search Keywords
   $description = str_ireplace($keywords, '<span style="color: #000000; background-color: #FFFF00; font-weight: normal;">'.$keywords.'</span>', $description);

// Replaces the character strings with the website and general images path urls
   if(strpos('http://my_domain_name.com/sports', $keywords) != false) {
     $description = str_ireplace('1q2w3e4r5t6y7u', 'http://my_domain_name.com/sports', $description);
   }
   if(strpos('http://my_domain_name.com/sports/images', $keywords) != false) {
     $description = str_ireplace('7u6y5t4r3e2w1q', 'http://my_domain_name.com/sports/images', $description);
   }
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Just working with strings I would just do the following since all the attribute values always come before the element value it’s easy to get the right match, then just use a callback to replace ‘sports’ with whatever you like.

    probably more what you need:

    function replacer($match)
{
    global $replace_match_with_this, $string_to_replace;
    return str_ireplace($string_to_replace, $replace_match_with_this, $match[0]);
}

$new_string = preg_replace_callback(sprintf('/>[^<>]*[\s-]+%s[\s-]+[^<>]*<\/a>/i', $keyword), 'replacer', $string, 1);

    presumably $keyword and $string_to_replace hold the same value and can be combined into one variable.

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