How to add some symbol to every word in string?

Question

I am looking for fast and good way to add "-" before every word in string. For example "bla bla bla" should become "-bla -bla -bla". I don't want to make an array of this string, then map it, etc. It looks like a wrong and slow way. Do you have any suggestions on this?

Answer 1

If we assume that a word is always separated by a whitespace and that the whitespace have no other special meaning we can do:

$str = 'bla bla bla';
$symbol = '-';

$newString = $symbol . str_replace(' ', " $symbol", $str);
echo $newString;

Output:

-bla -bla -bla

Answer 2

You should use the regular expressions:

echo preg_replace('/(\w+)/', '-$1', 'bla bla bla');

Search online for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions for more details!

Answer 3

How about

preg_replace('/(\w+)/i', '-$1', $string);