How do I replace a word in a string in PHP?

Manipulating strings and data is what the majority of PHP is about and what you will find yourself doing most - particularly if you use PHP on the web to process and manipulate user data entered into forms, for instance.

Therefore it is good to know how to replace a specific word or string within a string with something else.

Let's say, for instance, you want to remove swear words from a string of data. To make this example easy and show you how the function works, we're going to turn the word 'bloody' into 'b****y' in our example, so that it can be safely posted, say, on your message board:


<?php

//PHP program to clean swear words from data

$usersays = "I hate this bloody film it's useless!";



$cleaned = str_replace("bloody","b****y",$usersays);



echo "You wrote: $cleaned";

//You wrote: I hate this b****y film it's useless!

?>

If you had a whole list of words you wanted to substitute, then you could simply put them into an array and then loop around replacing each one in the input string.

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