Question

I have a string like:

$text = 'Hello this is my string and texts';

I’ve got some not allowed words in array:

$filtered_words = array(
            'string',
            'text'
        );

I want to replace all the filtered words in my $text with ***, so I wrote:

$text_array = explode(' ', $text);
        foreach($text_array as $key => $value){
            if(in_array($text_array[$key], $filtered_words)){
                $text = str_replace($text_array[$key], '***', $text);
            }
        }
echo $text;

The Output:

Hello this is my *** and texts

But I need function to also replace texts with *** since it’s also contain a filtered word(text).

How I could achieve this?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can just do it right away, str_replace supports to replace from an array into a single string:

$text = 'Hello this is my string and texts';

$filtered_words = array(
    'string',
    'texts',
    'text',
);

$zap = '***';

$filtered_text = str_replace($filtered_words, $zap, $text);

echo $filtered_text;

Output (Demo):

Hello this is my *** and ***

Take care you have the largest words first and keep in mind when str_replace is in that mode, it will do one replacement after the other – like in your loop. So shorter words – if earlier – could be part of larger words.

If you need something more failsafe you must consider doing a textual analysis first. That could also tell you if you didn’t know about words you might want to replace but you didn’t thought of so far.