PHP 7.0.6 Released

mb_ereg_replace

(PHP 4 >= 4.2.0, PHP 5, PHP 7)

mb_ereg_replaceReplace regular expression with multibyte support

Description

string mb_ereg_replace ( string $pattern , string $replacement , string $string [, string $option = "msr" ] )

Scans string for matches to pattern, then replaces the matched text with replacement

Parameters

pattern

The regular expression pattern.

Multibyte characters may be used in pattern.

replacement

The replacement text.

string

The string being checked.

option
Matching condition can be set by option parameter. If i is specified for this parameter, the case will be ignored. If x is specified, white space will be ignored. If m is specified, match will be executed in multiline mode and line break will be included in '.'. If p is specified, match will be executed in POSIX mode, line break will be considered as normal character. If e is specified, replacement string will be evaluated as PHP expression.

Return Values

The resultant string on success, or FALSE on error.

Notes

Note:

The internal encoding or the character encoding specified by mb_regex_encoding() will be used as the character encoding for this function.

Warning

Never use the e modifier when working on untrusted input. No automatic escaping will happen (as known from preg_replace()). Not taking care of this will most likely create remote code execution vulnerabilities in your application.

See Also

User Contributed Notes

Pluche
5 years ago
Unlike preg_replace, mb_ereg_replace doesn't use separators

Exemple with preg_replace :
<?php $data = preg_replace("/[^A-Za-z0-9\.\-]/","",$data); ?>

Exemple with mb_ereg_replace :
<?php $data = mb_ereg_replace("[^A-Za-z0-9\.\-]","",$data); ?>
daemoneye at gmail dot com
7 years ago
I got a pretty nasty error while trying to parse table rows(all contents were set to UTF-8) from the database for a dictionary project. The idea was to get all the rows from the first table (that is a table with bulgarian phrase in the first field, and its translation in english, french and german in the next fields). I needed to index all the bulgarian words that are found in the table to make an intelligent search. And that is where my headache started.

First of all, even with mb_strtolower() a lot of cyrillic characters went corrupted (ex: 'т,ъ,у,ф,б,г,з,ж,' etc...). After an hour of different attempts I got such a solution:

<?php

mb_internal_encoding
("UTF-8");
mb_regex_encoding("UTF-8");

$rows = $db->getRows();

$contents = array();
foreach (
$rows as $eachRow)
{
   
$cleared = str_replace($commonWords, ' ', mb_strtolower(stripslashes($eachRow['bulgarian']), 'UTF-8' ));
    if (
trim($cleared) != '') $contents[] = trim($cleared);
}   

$list = array();
foreach (
$contents as $eachRow)
{
   
$exploded = explode(' ', $eachRow);
    foreach (
$exploded as $eachExpl)
    {
       
$eachExpl = mb_ereg_replace('[^а-я ]',' ', $eachExpl);
        if (
trim($eachExpl) != '')
            if (!
in_array($eachExpl, $list, true))    $list[] = trim($eachExpl);
    }
}

?>

To work properly I got to set all the internal encoding settings to UTF-8. Else the default Latin-1 got half my database with missing characters.

I am posting this solution just in case someone has encountered a similar problem. Hope it helps you in case you need something like that.
keizo at gomo dot jp
7 years ago
<?php
$pattern
= "([あ-ん]+)[0-9]+";
$string = mb_ereg_replace($pattern, '「\\1」:\\0', $string);
?>

you can use \\n for capture group in replacement
Anonymous
3 months ago
Pluche's comment should REALLY be added to the documentation, preferably under the "$pattern" param description. It is crucial to using this function.
Anonymous
9 years ago
'i' option does not work correctly with multibyte characters. The function does not locate/replace the multibyte string if it's different case then specified on multibyte needle which is in different case.
trng
4 years ago
You can use \\n for capture group in replacement.
And you can NOT use $n notation (unlike preg_replace function).
marco at thenetworksolution dot it
2 years ago
To selectively uppercase parts of a string via mb_eregi_replace

    $str = mb_eregi_replace('\b([0-9]{1,4}[a-z]{1,2})\b', "strtoupper
('\\1')", $str, 'e');

Full example, how to fix an address manually typed, uppercasing the first letter of a words and keeping uppercase roman numerals and the letters A,B,C after the house number):

function ucAddress($str) {
// first lowercase all and use the default ucwords
    $str = ucwords(strtolower($str));
// let's fix the default ucwords...
// uppercase letters after house number (was lowercased by the strtolower above)
    $str = mb_eregi_replace('\b([0-9]{1,4}[a-z]{1,2})\b', "strtoupper
('\\1')", $str, 'e');
// the same for roman numerals
    $str = mb_eregi_replace('\bM{0,4}(CM|CD|D?C{0,3})(XC|XL|L?X{0,3})(IX|IV|V?I{0,3})\b', "strtoupper('\\0')", $str, 'e');
    return $str;
}
gmx dot net at ulrich dot mierendorff
7 years ago
If you want to replace characters like "ä" or "ø" you can use mb_ereg_replace, but it is very slow. str_replace is much faster and also works with characters like "ä" or "ø"!

I think this has something to with the fact that str_replace works on byte level and does not care about characters.
I hope that can help.
squeegee
9 years ago
well, if you just calculated the length of the find and replace strings once instead of on every loop, it would likely speed it up a lot.
mpnicholas [@t] gmail (dot) com
9 years ago
Regarding the mb_str_ireplace() function: I benchmarked it against mb_eregi_replace() for single-character substitution, and it was significantly slower. Despite avoiding the ereg call, I think the while loop ends slowing you down too much for this to be practical.
vondrej(at)gmail(dot)com
10 years ago
Are you looking for htmlentities() for multibyte strings? This might help you - it just replace <, >, ", '

<?php
/**
*  Multibyte equivalent for htmlentities() [lite version :)]
*
* @param string $str
* @param string $encoding
* @return string
**/
function mb_htmlentities($str, $encoding = 'utf-8') {
   
mb_regex_encoding($encoding);
   
$pattern = array('<', '>', '"', '\'');
   
$replacement = array('&lt;', '&gt;', '&quot;', '&#39;');
    for (
$i=0; $i<sizeof($pattern); $i++) {
       
$str = mb_ereg_replace($pattern[$i], $replacement[$i], $str);
    }
    return
$str;
}
?>
faxe at neostrada dot pl
10 years ago
A simple mb_str_ireplace() implementation - a faster (?) replacement for non-regexp multi-byte string replacement:

<?php
function mb_str_ireplace($co, $naCo, $wCzym)
{
   
$wCzymM = mb_strtolower($wCzym);
   
$coM    = mb_strtolower($co);
   
$offset = 0;
   
        while(!
is_bool($poz = mb_strpos($wCzymM, $coM, $offset)))
    {
       
$offset = $poz + mb_strlen($naCo);
       
$wCzym = mb_substr($wCzym, 0, $poz). $naCo .mb_substr($wCzym, $poz+mb_strlen($co));
       
$wCzymM = mb_strtolower($wCzym);
    }
   
    return
$wCzym;
}
?>

[thiago - EDITOR NOTE: This function has improvements from d-okumura [aat] fi{dot}kyd[dot]co.jp]
marco at thenetworksolution dot it
2 years ago
To selectively uppercase parts of a string via mb_eregi_replace

    $str = mb_eregi_replace('\b([0-9]{1,4}[a-z]{1,2})\b', "strtoupper
('\\1')", $str, 'e');

Full example, how to fix an address manually typed, uppercasing the first letter of a words and keeping uppercase roman numerals and the letters A,B,C after the house number):

function ucAddress($str) {
// first lowercase all and use the default ucwords
    $str = ucwords(strtolower($str));
// let's fix the default ucwords...
// uppercase letters after house number (was lowercased by the strtolower above)
    $str = mb_eregi_replace('\b([0-9]{1,4}[a-z]{1,2})\b', "strtoupper
('\\1')", $str, 'e');
// the same for roman numerals
    $str = mb_eregi_replace('\bM{0,4}(CM|CD|D?C{0,3})(XC|XL|L?X{0,3})(IX|IV|V?I{0,3})\b', "strtoupper('\\0')", $str, 'e');
    return $str;
}

Dr. Marco Marsala
Network Solution srl
http://www.realizzazionesitigenova.it
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