Question

i have a string and im using preg_match_all to find some tags in that string:

$str = " 
Line 1: This is a string 
Line 2: [img]http://placehold.it/350x150[/img] Should not be [youtube]SDeWJqKx3Y0[/youtube] included."; 

preg_match_all("~\[img](.+?)\[/img]~i", $str, $img);  
preg_match_all("~\[youtube](.+?)\[/youtube]~i", $str, $youtube);

foreach ($img[1] as $key => $value) {
    echo '<img src="'.$value.'" "/>';
}

foreach ($youtube[1] as $key => $value) {
    echo '<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/'.$value.'" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> </iframe>';
}

this will return exactly what is being echoes with the right values.

but what i actually want is to return the entire string with the the [img] and [youtube] tags replaced with the values from those foreach statements:

Line 1: This is a string 
    Line 2: <img src="http://placehold.it/350x150" "/> Should not be <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/SDeWJqKx3Y0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> </iframe> included.

i’m not looking for a 3rd party alternative, just plain php functions.

i’m thinking of using preg_match and some case and switch statements, but i didn’t succeeded yet

an ideas?

Answer 1

You can use preg_replace

With something like this.

$pattern = Array();
$pattern[0] = "~\[img](.+?)\[/img]~i";
$pattern[1] = "~\[youtube](.+?)\[/youtube]~i";

$replacement = Array();
$replacement[0] = '<img src="${1}" "/>';
$replacement[1] =  '<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/${1}" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> </iframe>';

$stringToReturn = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $str);