Question

I have a string with the same character in it several times and I want to replace each occurrence of this character with a different string from an array. I.e. just like in prepared statements:

String: "SELECT * FROM x WHERE a = ? AND b = ?"
Array: ['alpha', 'beta']

Result: "SELECT * FROM x WHERE a = alpha AND b = beta"

Answer 1

If you have control over what the replacement character is, use sprintf

sprintf('Hello %s, how %s %s?', 'World', 'are', 'you');

or vsprintf:

vsprintf('Hello %s, how %s %s?', array('World', 'are', 'you'));

And even if you don’t:

$str = 'Hello ?, I hope ? ?.';
$str = str_replace('?', '%s', $str);
$str = sprintf($str, "World", "you're", "fine");