Question

I have a normal paragraph like this:

<p>Hey there, I'm a normal paragraph. generated by a WordPress blog</p>

And I want to change the:

<p> with <h2> and </p> with </h2>

I used str_replace();

$paragraph = array("<p>", "</p>");
$heading2 = array("<h2>","</h2>");
$first_sentence = str_replace($paragraph, $heading2, $first_sentence);

And it should work, but I get this:

<h2>Hey there, I'm a normal paragraph. generated by a WordPress blog<p>/p&gt;</p>

Any ideas why?

Answer 1

You can use Regex for this kind of task:

$first_sentence = preg_replace('/<p>([^<]+)<\/p>/', '<h2>$1</h2>', $first_sentence);

([^<]+) means: catch all chars, until < occurs.

Here you can see it working: http://codepad.viper-7.com/FW1vm5

But if it gets more complex you should use other techniques (like a DOM parser)