PHP preg_replace/preg_match vs PHP str_replace

php preg-replace preg-match str-replace
benhowdle89 picture benhowdle89 · Mar 9, 2011 · Viewed 43.2k times · Source

Can anyone give me a quick summary of the differences please?

To my mind they both do the same thing?

Thanks

Answer

mingos picture mingos · Mar 9, 2011

str_replace replaces a specific occurrence of a string, for instance "foo" will only match and replace that: "foo". preg_replace will do regular expression matching, for instance "/f.{2}/" will match and replace "foo", but also "fey", "fir", "fox", "f12", etc.

[EDIT]

See for yourself:

$string = "foo fighters";
$str_replace = str_replace('foo','bar',$string);
$preg_replace = preg_replace('/f.{2}/','bar',$string);
echo 'str_replace: ' . $str_replace . ', preg_replace: ' . $preg_replace;

The output is:

str_replace: bar fighters, preg_replace: bar barhters

:)

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