Question

I know this is really easy, and I’ve done it a million times myself; but it’s late in the day and I have a brain meltdown.

I’m trying to match and replace whole words rather than every occurance.

So, I want to replace each occurance of the word ‘me’ and replace it with ‘xxx’

Ie. ‘Me meets smeg’ becomes ‘xxx meets smeg’

What I DO NOT want is:

‘Me meets smeg’ becomes ‘xxx xxxets sxxg’

I know it’s preg_match but I just can’t remember the pattern matching for whole words.

Please help

Oliver.

Answer 1

Try the following regex:

$replaced = preg_replace('/\bme\b/i', 'xxx', $subject);

\b is the word boundry as defined in the PCRE Reference.