Question

I have a string containing html and “tags” in the form [realtor:name] or [office:phone]. I have a (CakePHP-generated) array of database data, such that the realtor’s name can be found in $data[‘Realtor’][‘name’] and the office phone at $data[‘Office’][‘phone’].

I want to do a find-and-replace on the string, replacing each tag with the correct data, possibly using preg_replace_callback. I’m a bit of a newbie, though, so this is the closest I’ve got, and I’m sure it’s ridiculously slow and inefficient:

function template_swap($html, $data) {

    preg_match_all('/\[(.*):(.*)\]/', $html, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

    foreach ($matches as $match) {
        if (isset( $data[ ucfirst($match[1]) ] )) {
            if (array_key_exists( $match[2], $data[ ucfirst($match[1]) ] )) {
                $html = str_replace( 
                    $match[0],
                    $data[ ucfirst($match[1]) ][ $match[2] ],
                    $html
                );
            }
        }
    }

    return html;
}

Can anyone help me out with some ideas on better ways to get this done?

Answer 1

/\[\s*\'([^\']*)\'\s*\]\s*:\s*\[\s*\'([^\']*)\'\s*\]/