Question

Let’s say I got this string:

$str = "alemylaife";

(I know it’s misspelled, all my life)

Now how can I replace

“ale” without replacing whatever comes after “ale” that also contains the same letters?

Let’s say I got this arrays:

$replace = Array("a","l","e");  
$with = Array("wh","at","ever");

$str = str_replace($replace,$with,$str);
echo $str;

this will print:

 whatevermyatwhifever 

How could I stop the str_replace for replacing the letters after “ale”?
Maybe I got to trim the 3 first letters then replacing them then join the trimmed strings?

EDIT: I’m going to try to express myself clearer.
I want only the three (3) first letters to be replaced IF they contain A THEN L THEN whateverletter so, ala ale ald alr aly. Those are the letters that I want to be replaced. I don’t want letters after them to be affected.

Answer 1

Question isn’t really clear. Assuming you want to replace “ale” with “whatever” (correct me if I’m wrong), then you could use preg_replace to limit the number of replacements.

Example 1: (replace the first occurrence of “ale”)

preg_replace("/ale/", "whatever", "alemylaife", 1)
> whatevermylaife

Example 2: (replace only if the string starts with “ale”)

preg_replace("/^ale/", "whatever", "alemylaife", 1)
> whatevermylaife

preg_replace("/^ale/", "whatever", "lolalemylaife", 1)
> lolalemylaife

EDIT: You edited your question to provide better details, I would use:

// match a string that begins with "al" and then a character (case in-sensitive)
preg_replace("/^al[a-z]/i", "whatever", "alemylaife");