Preg Replace - replace second occurance of a match

Question

I am relatively new to php, and hope someone can help me with a replace regex, or maybe a match replace I am not exactly sure.

I want to automatically bold the (seco

Answer 1

That's an interesting question. My implementation would be:

function replace_exact($word, $tag, $string, $limit) {
    $tag1 = '<'.$tag.'>';
    $tag2 = '';
    $string = str_replace($word, $tag1.$word.$tag2, $string, 1);
    if ($limit==1) return $string;
    return str_replace($tag1.$word.$tag2,$word,$string,$limit-1);
}

Use it like this:

echo replace_exact('Example', 'b', $source_text, 2);
echo replace_exact('Example', 'i', $source_text, 4);

I don't know about how fast this will work, but it will be faster than preg_replace.