Question

The function str_replace() accepts an array as its first parameter, but I don’t see any way to store the string for use in the second parameter where the found text is replaced. For instance, if I want to format around the string with brackets or quotation marks.

Here’s an example. Say I was looking to insert quotation marks around the words in $array when they’re spit back out or change the case of the word to from all lowercase to the case set in $array:

$array = array('Over','Dog','Quick');

$string = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";

$string = explode(" ",$string);

foreach ($string as $word) {

    echo str_replace($array, "???", $word);

    echo " ";

}

That will return The ??? brown fox jumps ??? the lazy ???. I realize this might be a job for regex, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to get it to handle both formatting and replacing. I feel like I’m missing something here, but nothing I google even touches this subject.

Answer 1

$array = array('Over', 'Dog', 'Quick');

$string = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";

echo str_ireplace($array, $array, $string);

See it here in action: http://viper-7.com/q7n7uw

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So, for example, if you want to put quotation marks around the string, use this:

$array = array('Over', 'Dog', 'Quick');
$replacements = array();
foreach($array as $item) $replacements[] = '"' . $item . '"';

$string = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";

echo str_ireplace($array, $replacements, $string);

See here: http://viper-7.com/2afgL5

---

In reality though, this is a job for preg_replace:

$search = array('Over','Dog','Quick');

foreach($search as &$item) $item = '~\b(' . $item . ')\b~i';

$string = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";

echo preg_replace($search, '"$1"', $string);

See here: http://viper-7.com/nAlqzX