Question

I have a script that generates content containing certain tokens, and I need to replace each occurrence of a token, with different content resulting from a separate loop.

It’s simple to use str_replace to replace all occurrences of the token with the same content, but I need to replace each occurrence with the next result of the loop.

I did see this answer: Search and replace multiple values with multiple/different values in PHP5?

however it is working from pre-defined arrays, which I don’t have.

Sample content:

This is an example of %%token%% that might contain multiple instances of a particular
%%token%%, that need to each be replaced with a different piece of %%token%% generated 
elsewhere.

I need to replace each occurrence of %%token%% with content generated, for argument’s sake, by this simple loop:

for($i=0;$i<3;$i++){
    $token = rand(100,10000);
}

So replace each %%token%% with a different random number value $token.

Is this something simple that I’m just not seeing?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I don’t think you can do this using any of the search and replace functions, so you’ll have to code up the replace yourself.

It looks to me like this problem works well with explode(). So, using the example token generator you provided, the solution looks like this:

$shrapnel = explode('%%token%%', $str);
$newStr = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < count($shrapnel); ++$i)  {
    // The last piece of the string has no token after it, so we special-case it
    if ($i == count($shrapnel) - 1)
        $newStr .= $shrapnel[$i];
    else
        $newStr .= $shrapnel[$i] . rand(100,10000);
}