Question

I think this is probably a fairly common but I haven’t found a match in any of the previously answered SO questions.

If I have a string like this:

[Our Story] The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs. [Our
analysis] whatever…

and want to replace the bracketed string with <h1>str</h1> then how could I do this? This is similar to implementing the {} code option in this SO window.

Answer 1

you use what is called a backreference. in this instance, \1 represents the bracketed portion of the regex pattern.

$string = preg_replace('/\[(.*)\]/', '<h1>\1</h1>', $string)