Question

Just wondering if it is possible to change a character in a string with more than 1 character. Here’s my failed attempt:

<?
$string = abcde;
echo "character 2: ". $string[2] . "\n";
$string[2] = "X";
echo "character 2: ". $string[2] . "\n";
$string[2] = "moreThanOneChar";
echo "character 2: ". $string[2] . "\n";
echo "whole string: $string";
?>

output:

character 2: c
character 2: X
character 2: m      
whole string: abmde   // <-- This should be abmoreThanOneCharde

http://codepad.org/e2dDkH37

Answer 1

You can solve this using a regular expression (regex) replacement mechanism:

$string = preg_replace('/X/', 'moreThanOneChar', $string);

Note; however, that this will replace every instance of ‘X’ with ‘moreThanOneChar’. If you want to limit this to only the first time, you can pass a limit as a fourth parameter:

$string = preg_replace('/X/', 'moreThanOneChar', $string, 1);

This can be easily expanded to replace phrases:

$string = 'Hello, man!';
$string = preg_replace('/man/', 'person', $string);

echo $string;

Output:

Hello, person!

Review the preg_replace command for more information:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php