Str_replace for multiple items

Question

Like this:

str_replace(array(':', '\\', '/', '*'), ' ', $string);

Or, in modern PHP (anything from 5.4 onwards), the slighty less wordy:

str_replace([':', '\\', '/', '*'], ' ', $string);

str_replace() can take an array, so you could do:

$new_str = str_replace(str_split('\\/:*?"<>|'), ' ', $string);

Alternatively you could use preg_replace():

$new_str = preg_replace('~[\\\\/:*?"<>|]~', ' ', $string);

For example, if you want to replace search1 with replace1 and search2 with replace2 then following code will work:

print str_replace(
    array("search1","search2"),
    array("replace1", "replace2"),
    "search1 search2"
);

// Output: replace1 replace2

str_replace(
    array("search","items"),
    array("replace", "items"),
    $string
);

If you're only replacing single characters, you should use strtr()

You could use preg_replace(). The following example can be run using command line php:

<?php
$s1 = "the string \\/:*?\"<>|";
$s2 = preg_replace("^[\\\\/:\*\?\"<>\|]^", " ", $s1) ;
echo "\n\$s2: \"" . $s2 . "\"\n";
?>

Output:

$s2: "the string          "