php man page for ereg_replace

EREG_REPLACE(3) 							 1							   EREG_REPLACE(3)

ereg_replace - Replace regular expression

SYNOPSIS
       string ereg_replace (string  $pattern, string  $replacement, string  $string)

DESCRIPTION
	This function scans $string for matches to $pattern, then replaces the matched text with $replacement.

       Warning

	      This function has been DEPRECATED as of PHP 5.3.0. Relying on this feature is highly discouraged.

PARAMETERS
	      o $pattern
		- A POSIX extended regular expression.

	      o $replacement
		-  If  $pattern contains parenthesized substrings, $replacement may contain substrings of the form  digit, which will be replaced
		by the text matching the digit'th parenthesized substring;  will produce the entire contents of string. Up  to  nine	substrings
		may be used. Parentheses may be nested, in which case they are counted by the opening parenthesis.

	      o $string
		- The input string.

RETURN VALUES
	The modified string is returned. If no matches are found in $string, then it will be returned unchanged.

EXAMPLES
	For example, the following code snippet prints "This was a test" three times:

       Example #1

	      ereg_replace(3) example

	      <?php

	      $string = "This is a test";
	      echo str_replace(" is", " was", $string);
	      echo ereg_replace("( )is", "\1was", $string);
	      echo ereg_replace("(( )is)", "\2was", $string);

	      ?>

	One  thing to take note of is that if you use an integer value as the $replacement parameter, you may not get the results you expect. This
       is because ereg_replace(3) will interpret the number as the ordinal value of a character, and apply that. For instance:

       Example #2

	      ereg_replace(3) example

	      <?php
	      /* This will not work as expected. */
	      $num = 4;
	      $string = "This string has four words.";
	      $string = ereg_replace('four', $num, $string);
	      echo $string;   /* Output: 'This string has   words.' */

	      /* This will work. */
	      $num = '4';
	      $string = "This string has four words.";
	      $string = ereg_replace('four', $num, $string);
	      echo $string;   /* Output: 'This string has 4 words.' */
	      ?>

       Example #3

	      Replace URLs with links

	      <?php
	      $text = ereg_replace("[[:alpha:]]+://[^<>[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/]",
				   '<a href="\0">\0</a>', $text);
	      ?>

NOTES
       Note

	      As of PHP 5.3.0, the regex extension is deprecated in favor of the PCRE extension. Calling this function will issue an  E_DEPRECATED
	      notice. See the list of differences for help on converting to PCRE.

       Tip

	      ereg_replace(3) is deprecated as of PHP 5.3.0. preg_replace(3) is the suggested alternative to this function.

SEE ALSO
       ereg(3), eregi(3), eregi_replace(3), str_replace(3), preg_replace(3), quotemeta(3).

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