PHP 7.0.6 Released

    ereg_replace

    (PHP 4, PHP 5)

    ereg_replace — Replace regular expression

    Warning

    This function was DEPRECATED in PHP 5.3.0, and REMOVED in PHP 7.0.0.

    Alternatives to this function include:

    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.

    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);
    ?>

    See Also

    • ereg() - Regular expression match
    • eregi() - Case insensitive regular expression match
    • eregi_replace() - Replace regular expression case insensitive
    • str_replace() - Replace all occurrences of the search string with the replacement string
    • preg_replace() - Perform a regular expression search and replace
    • quotemeta() - Quote meta characters

    User Contributed Notes

    Real PHP Geek
    7 years ago
    This function makes links unclickable, read the comments:

    <?php
    function strip_urls($text, $repPat)
    {
        if(!    $repPat){
                $repPat = "text [url]";
        }
            $aimpstr = 'PHP_STRIP_URLS_FUNCTION_BY_REAL-PHP-GEEK';
            //change $aimpstr to anything you want.
            $impstr = md5($aimpstr);
            $text = str_replace('</a>', '</a>' . $impstr, $text);
            $text = explode($impstr, $text);
            $n = 0;
            $texta = array();
            $repPat = str_ireplace(array('text', 'url'), array('\\4', '\\2'), $repPat);
        foreach (    $text as $text) {
                $texta[$n] = ereg_replace("<a(.*)href=\"(.*)\"(.*)>(.*)</a>", $repPat, $text);
                $n++;
        }
            $textb = implode("</a>", $texta);
        return     $textb;
    }

    //EXAMPLES:
    $string_of_text = '<a href="http://www.php.net/">PHP</a> rocks. <a href="http://www.apache.org/">Apache</a> also!';
    echo     strip_urls($string_of_text, "text");
    echo     strip_urls($string_of_text, "url");
    echo     strip_urls($string_of_text, "text [url]");
    echo     strip_urls($string_of_text, NULL);
    ?>
    Renjith
    8 years ago
    Code:

    <?php

    $s     = "Coding PHP is fun.";

    $pattern = "(.*)PHP(.*)";
    $replacement = " They say \\1other languages\\2";

    print     ereg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $s);

    ?>

    Output:
    They say Coding other languages is fun.
    Explanation:

    "PHP" is replaced with "other languages", and the sentence is changed a little, using \1 and \2 to access the parts within parentheses.
    http://php-regex.blogspot.com/
    bjwarshaw2 at yahoo dot com
    8 years ago
    It's worth mentioning for ultimate clarity that you're safest using double quotes when matching a pattern, since without them, metacharacters will be interpreted as a backslash plus another character.

    Granted, this is part of the language syntax for the string type, but it might not be quite so obvious when dealing with patterns in this function, which is taking the pattern as a parameter.

    So if you find that '[\n]' is taking the 'n' out of your string and leaving the new lines alone, switch to doubles before changing anything else.
    Joe
    5 years ago
    Since ereg_replace is now deprecated, many users will be coming to this page, in an attempt to troubleshoot and fix broken scripts after a PHP upgrade.

    ereg_replace is essentially a search and replace function and it follows a pattern like this:

    <?php

    $input     = ereg_replace("find this", "replace it with", $output);

    ?>

    You start out by defining the input variable ($input), then the = ereg_replace portion tells php to do a search and replace action on the value of $input, then once the value has been modified with your 'find this' and 'replace with' section, the resulting value is defined as a variable $output which you can then use in other parts of your script or page.

    Lets take a real world example.

    There is a e-comm site - http://www.example.com - that has millions of item records.  Each item has a name, that is defined as a variable called $title.  Each $title value has spaces, i.e. "Range Cookers" or "Bosch Dishwashers", but we want to convert these into a page url that does not contain spaces, but uses the plus character '+' instead of a space (you can use hyphens '-' or other characters).

    If using the deprecated ereg_replace function, it might look something like this:

    <?php

    $title    =ereg_replace(" ", "+", $itemurl);

    ?>

    But to avoid those deprecated errors, we change the function name to preg_replace and add a set of delimiters, in this case the 2 forward slashes / / where the contents inside that are matched as the 'find this' portion.

    <?php

    $title    =preg_replace("/ /", "+", $itemurl);

    ?>

    It is not absolutely necessary to use / / as the delimiters, if you are modifying directory names which may naturally contain forward slashes, it could cause it to break because the slashes in the url or directory would be interpreted as the delimiter, so you could use other obscure characters i.e.  ("# #", "+", $itemurl);  instead.  This would give an output like:

    http://www.example.com/-Range+Cooker

    http://www.example.com/-Bosch+Dishwasher

    This would strip out the spaces from the value of $title and give you a variable called $itemurl where all the spaces were replaced with the plus character, so you could potentially use it as a url like above.

    So to summarize:  ereg_replace is a deprecated search and replace action where preg_replace can be used instead, and it follows a pattern as described earlier where it takes the input data, finds a match based on what you are looking for, replaces it with something else you define, and then gives you an output data variable that you can use in your script or page.  Hopefully by understanding the process, the php code functions wont seem like voodoo and you could troubleshoot and fix many of the deprecated errors yourself.
    jarfil at jarfil dot net
    8 years ago
    For simple patterns like "[a-z]", preg_replace is up to 6 times faster than ereg_replace.
    mephissto at gmail dot com
    8 years ago
    Your right but you just need to replace by :

    <?php
    function hyperlink(&$text)
    {
            // match protocol://address/path/
            $text = ereg_replace("[a-zA-Z]+://([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*", "<a href=\"\\0\">\\0</a>", $text);

            // match www.something
            $text = ereg_replace("(^| |.)(www([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*)", "\\1<a href=\"http://\\2\">\\2</a>", $text);
    }
    ?>
    hoffaboffa (at) hotmail dott com
    8 years ago
    cristiklein's hyperlink function is nice but works incorrect with a www-string like this

    \r\nwww.google.se

    then it does not become a hyperlink
    bmcswee at gmail dot com dot invalid
    9 years ago
    Function to strip an HTML tag out of a string. I use this in part for parsing XML documents.

    <?php

    function stripTags($tag, $string) {
                // Regular expressions only work with strings if the regexp has been pre-concocted
            $regExp = "<" . "$tag" . "[^>]*>";

            $string = str_replace("</$tag>", "", $string);
            $string = ereg_replace($regExp, "", $string);
       
        return     $string;   
    }

    ?>
    chrish at shield dot on dot ca
    10 years ago
    I was having problems with Microsoft Outlook viewing forms within email.  I was only able to see the first word of the text box after I used the following code.

    If I entered words into the text box and used the enter key to give me a CRLF I could see in the returned data the %0D%0A string, so I assumed if I just used the ereg-replace as below it would just replace the %0D%0A with a single space...

    function remove_extra_linebreaks($string) {
       $new_string=ereg_replace("%0D%0A", " ", $string);
      return $new_string;
    }

    But the form as displayed by Outlook only showed the text upto the first replaced string, then it was blank!
    I could view the source of the email and it would show all of the text I expected.

    The following will show the correct data in the form

    function remove_extra_linebreaks($string) {
       $new_string=ereg_replace("%0D%0A", '+', $string);
      return $new_string;
    }
    Chris
    10 years ago
    I've updated the function a little that was posted below.  I use it to make database field names readable when making a header row.  I needed it to quit putting a space in "GPA" and to put a space in between numbers and letters.

    <?php
    /**
    *  Converts "fieldcontainingGPAInMyDatabaseFrom2005"
    *  To       "Field Containing GPA In My Database From 2005"
    */
    function innerCapsToReadableText($text) {
            $text = ereg_replace("([A-Z]) ", "\\1",ucwords(strtolower(ereg_replace("[A-Z]"," \\0",$text))));
        return     ereg_replace("([A-Za-z])([0-9])", "\\1 \\2", $text);
    }
    ?>
    codergeek42 at users dot sourceforge.net
    10 years ago
    In response to "php dot net at lenix dot de," a cleaner (easier to read) method would be to type-cast the integer as a string by quoting it. For example:

    <?php
    $foo     = 42;
    echo     ereg_replace ( "bar", "$foo" , "foobar" ); /* Would output "foo42". */
    ?>
    benlanc at ster dot me dot uk
    10 years ago
    Quite how I managed to get my previous post so wrong, I don't know. Correction follows:
    <?php
    /* function to turn InterCaps style strings (i.e. CSS Properties in Javascript) to human readable ones */
    function deInterCaps($var){
       return     ucfirst(strtolower(ereg_replace("[A-Z]"," \\0",$var)));
    }

    $interCapsString = "aLoadOfNonsenseToDemonstrateTheFunction";

    echo     deInterCaps($interCapsString);

    // output: A load of nonsense to demonstrate the function
    ?>
    php dot net at lenix dot de
    10 years ago
    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.

    If you're ever having trouble with this one there's an easy workarround:

    instead of
    <?php
    $foo     = 23;
    echo     ereg_replace ( "bar", $foo , "foobar" );
    ?>

    just do

    <?php
    $foo     = 23;
    echo     ereg_replace ( "bar", "" . $foo , "foobar" );
    ?>

    to replace "bar" inside "foobar" with the string "23".
    zaczek at gmail dot com
    10 years ago
    If you want the function to process query strings, such as:

    http://www.php.net/index.php?id=10%32&wp=test

    modify the function as follows:

    function hyperlink(&$text)
    {
       // match protocol://address/path/
       $text = ereg_replace("[a-zA-Z]+://([-]*[.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-?&%])*", "<a href=\"\\0\">\\0</a>", $text);

       // match www.something
       $text = ereg_replace("(^| )(www([-]*[.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-?&%])*)", "\\1<a href=\"http://\\2\">\\2</a>", $text);
    }
    cristiklein at yahoo dot com
    11 years ago
    Sometimes, you would like to match both styles of URL links that are common in chat windows:

    http://www.yahoo.com
    www.yahoo.com

    You can do this by using the following code:

    <?php
    function hyperlink(&$text)
    {
            // match protocol://address/path/
            $text = ereg_replace("[a-zA-Z]+://([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*", "<a href=\"\\0\">\\0</a>", $text);

            // match www.something
            $text = ereg_replace("(^| )(www([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*)", "\\1<a href=\"http://\\2\">\\2</a>", $text);
    }
    ?>

    You can use this function like this:
    <?php
    $line     = "Check the links: www.yahoo.com http://www.php.net";
    hyperlink($line);
    // Now, all text that looks like a link becomes a link
    ?>
    bgoodman at osogrande dot com
    11 years ago
    When you are dealing with databases you can end up with quite a few \" to deal with.  To ereg_replace all these with something else it requires you to \ the \ and \ the " so you end up with:

    $var1 = '\"';
    $var2 = ereg_replace('\\\"','1234',$var1);

    print $var2;  //this should print 1234
    eerie at gmx dot net
    11 years ago
    <?php $path = ereg_replace("\\", "/", $path); ?>
    as posted from mmtach at yahoo dot com causes an error because you have to escape the backslash twice, once for the quotation marks and a second time due the posix syntax.
    <?php $path = ereg_replace("\\\\", "/", $path); ?>
    or
    <?php $path = ereg_replace('\\', "/", $path); ?>
    should both work as expected. since you don't have to escape the backslash in brackets (posix syntax) his alternative works also.
    computer_guru
    7 years ago
    Here is the code I use to make links clickable. The code only works on xxxx:// (i.e. ftp://, http://, etc...). It does not work on www. because that is how I want it. The reason my code has an if condition is that it ignores html links and only modifies non-html urls. (see below)

    <?php
    function make_clickable($text)
    {
       
        if (    ereg("[\"|'][[:alpha:]]+://",$text) == false)
        {
                $text = ereg_replace('([[:alpha:]]+://[^<>[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/])', '<a target=\"_new\" href="\\1">\\1</a>', $text);
        }
        return(    $text);
    }
    ?>

    My function ignores code like this:

    <a href="http://php.net"> php.net </a>

    But it would make this one click able:

    http://php.net
    jammin320
    7 years ago
    Just a quick addition to the last post -

    modifying the regular expression for the www clause to include a newline at the begining will allow it to catch URLs that are the first in a line but not the first in a string. The previous version would only catch them if a space preceded the value...

        // match www.something
        $text = ereg_replace("(^| |\n)(www([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*)", "\\1<a href=\"http://\\2\">\\2</a>", $text);
    tugla
    8 years ago
    If you're not relying on regular expressions, str_replace() can be far faster.
    lvt
    5 years ago
    Be careful, don't replace all ereg_replace() with str_replace() as many people will likely to recommend if there is regular expression stuffs, or your script will stop running !!!

    Example : replace the (.) at the end of the text with (...)

    <?php

    $text     = "This is a simple text.";

    print(     ereg_replace( "\.$", "...", $text ) );

    ?>

    Test with str_replace() you will find it's not working.
    http://www.bbgames.co.nr
    7 years ago
    In response to a post above, his coding was a bit wrong.  The correct coding should be :

    <?php
    function hyperlink($text)
    {
            // match protocol://address/path/
            $text = ereg_replace("[a-zA-Z]+://([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*", "<a href=\"\\0\">\\0</a>", $text);

            // match www.something
            $text = ereg_replace("(^| )(www([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*)", "\\1<a href=\"http://\\2\">\\2</a>", $text);

            // return $text
            return $text;
    }
    ?>

    You can use this function like this:
    <?php
    $line     = "Check the links: www.yahoo.com http://www.php.net";
    hyperlink($line);
    // Now, all text that looks like a link becomes a link
    ?>
    Anonymous
    7 years ago
    <?php
    // highlights the recognized patterns (a good tool for experiments)

    $output = ereg_replace("your regexp here", "<font color=red>\\0</font>", $input)
    print     $output;
    ?>
    To Top