Question

I want to search and replace the first word with another in php like as follows:

$str="nothing inside";

Replace ‘nothing’ to ‘something’ by search and replace without using substr

output should be: ‘something inside’

Answer 1

Use preg_replace() with a limit of 1:

preg_replace('/nothing/', 'something', $str, 1);

Replace the regular expression /nothing/ with whatever string you want to search for. Since regular expressions are always evaluated left-to-right, this will always match the first instance.