Question

I have a string as below

$str = '"Mark Zuckerberg" facebook "A social utility connecting friends" profile';

I want it to be manipulated as follows

$output = '"Mark Zuckerberg" OR facebook OR "A social utility connecting friends" OR profile';

What I am trying to have in output is all the units combined with OR in between them. Here a unit is wither a single word when its not in double quotes or the complete string that falls within the single quotes.

I wanted to try with preg_replace. But am unable to get a correct regular expression to match. Kindly help!

Answer 1

$result = preg_replace('/ (?=(?:[^"]*"[^"]*")*[^"]*$)/', ' OR ', $subject);

works if you don’t have any escaped quotes in your string. It replaces spaces only if they are followed by an even number of double quotes.