Question

I have some flags I store in my mysql database so I can dynamically generate links and title tags using the following code; however, it seems to parse anything with a dollar sign as a variable.

foreach($result as $value){
    $id = $value['id'];
    $title = $value['title'];
    $synopsis = $value['synopsis'];

    $synopsis = preg_replace('/<!--TITLE-->/', $title, $synopsis);
}

So if the title is “$500,000 donated to blah blah” it will output “0,000 donated to blah blah”. How can I make it not parse this out? I’m not able to store the ascii value $ in the database for this particular case.

Answer 1

preg_replace looks through the second string and if it sees a $, treats it and the digits that follow as a reference to the capture group with that number. (It only takes the first two digits, though; the number ranges from 0 to 99.) And since you don’t have a 50th capture group, it interprets the $50 as nothing.

If you’re just looking to find and replace a known string rather than a pattern, try using str_replace instead of preg_replace. It doesn’t have such gotchas.