How to replace placeholders with actual values?

Question

I need a function that replace every variable_name inside \'{}\' with the correct variable. Something like this:

$data[\"name\"] = \"Johnny\";
$data[\"age\"         


        

Answer 1

You can do this most easily with the /e modifier of preg_replace:

$data["name"] = "Johnny";
$data["age"] = "20";

$string = "Hello my name is {name} and I'm {age} years old.";

echo preg_replace('/{(\w+)}/e', '$data["\\1"]', $string);

See it in action.

You might want to customize the pattern that matches the replacement strings (which here is {\w+}: one or more alphanumeric characters or underscores between curly brackets). Putting it into a function is trivial.