Question

So I decided to have a stab at making a text highlighting system. At the moment, I’m just using str_replace to replace a word (e.g. $rstr = str_replace("Console", "<c>Console</c>", $str where $str is the input string.

Something that stumped me was how to replace content inside of speech marks (“) and quotes (‘). For example, if the string “Console” turned into Console.WriteLine("Words");, how would I replace "Words" with <sr>"Words"</sr> (<sr> is defined in an external stylesheet)?

I had a though that I could use regex, but 1. I don’t know how to write regex, and 2. I don’t know how to use regex with str_replace.

---

My workaround solution:

function hlStr($original)
{
    $rstr = explode('"', $original);
    return $rstr[0].'<sr>"'.$rstr[1].'"</sr>'.$rstr[2];
}

Answer 1

In light of comments below, I think this will be a better resource for you: http://www.regular-expressions.info/

In order to find “anything can go here” you should use regular expressions. This is what they were made for. A regular expression for that might look something like the answers in this question:

How can I match a quote-delimited string with a regex?

then you would use the function preg_replace() like this:

$return_value = preg_replace('/"[^"]+"/', 'replacement text', $str)

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leaving this here anyway:

just escape the content with a backslash:

$rstr = str_replace("Console", "Console.WriteLine(\"$variable\");", $str)

this is mostly useful if you are using variables inside your strings. If it is just a straight text replacement, use single quotes:

$rstr = str_replace("Console", 'Console.WriteLine("Words");', $str)

the single quotes count everything but single quotes as just a character.