How To Replace a Group of Characters by Another Group?

While processing a string, you may want to replace a group of special characters with some other characters. For example, if you don't want to show user's email addresses in the original format to stop email spammer collecting real email addresses, you can replace the "@" and "." with something else. PHP offers the strtr() function with two format to help you:

• strtr(string, from, to) - Replacing each character in "from" with the corresponding character in "to".
• strtr(string, map) - Replacing each substring in "map" with the corresponding substring in "map".

Here is a PHP script on how to use strtr():

<?php
$email = "joe@dev.fyicenter.moc";
$map = array("@" => " at ", "." => " dot ");
print("Original: $email\n");
print("Character replacement: ".strtr($email, "@.", "#_")."\n");
print("Substring replacement: ".strtr($email, $map)."\n");
?>

This script will print:

Original: joe@dev.fyicenter.moc
Character replacement: joe#dev_fyicenter_moc
Substring replacement: joe at dev dot fyicenter dot moc

To help you to remember the function name, strtr(), "tr" stands for "translation".

⇒PHP Built-in Functions for Strings

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