ereg_replace
Replace regular expression
Description
string ereg_replace
( string $pattern
, string $replacement
, string $string
)
This function scans string for matches to
pattern, then replaces the matched text
with replacement.
WarningThis function has been
DEPRECATED as of PHP 5.3.0. Relying on this feature is
highly discouraged.
Parameters
-
pattern
-
A POSIX extended regular expression.
-
replacement
-
If pattern contains parenthesized substrings,
replacement may contain substrings of the form
\digit, which will be
replaced by the text matching the digit'th parenthesized substring;
\0 will produce the entire contents of string.
Up to nine substrings may be used. Parentheses may be nested, in which
case they are counted by the opening parenthesis.
-
string
-
The input string.
Return Values
The modified string is returned. If no matches are found in
string, then it will be returned unchanged.
Examples
For example, the following code snippet prints "This was a test"
three times:
Example #1 ereg_replace example
<?php
$string = "This is a test";
echo str_replace(" is", " was", $string);
echo ereg_replace("( )is", "\\1was", $string);
echo ereg_replace("(( )is)", "\\2was", $string);
?>
One thing to take note of is that if you use an integer value as
the replacement parameter, you may not get
the results you expect. This is because
ereg_replace will interpret the number as
the ordinal value of a character, and apply that. For instance:
Example #2 ereg_replace example
<?php
/* This will not work as expected. */
$num = 4;
$string = "This string has four words.";
$string = ereg_replace('four', $num, $string);
echo $string; /* Output: 'This string has words.' */
/* This will work. */
$num = '4';
$string = "This string has four words.";
$string = ereg_replace('four', $num, $string);
echo $string; /* Output: 'This string has 4 words.' */
?>
Example #3 Replace URLs with links
<?php
$text = ereg_replace("[[:alpha:]]+://[^<>[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/]",
'<a href="\\0">\\0</a>', $text);
?>
Notes
Note:
As of PHP 5.3.0, the
regex extension is deprecated in favor of the
PCRE extension. Calling this function
will issue an E_DEPRECATED notice. See the list of
differences for help on converting to PCRE.
Tip
ereg_replace is deprecated as of PHP 5.3.0. preg_replace
is the suggested alternative to this function.
See Also
- ereg
- eregi
- eregi_replace
- str_replace
- preg_replace
- quotemeta