I'm new to PHP. I would like to replace a string with specific duplicate words if more than three into two like below?
$wordToCheck = "abc";
$string = "abc abc abc abc Hello World abc abc abc My name is abc"
The result will be:
$outString = "abc abc Hello World abc abc My name is abc"
How can I do this in PHP?
Thanks in advance.
You can replace more than 2 consecutive same word with the following pattern that uses a backreference to the capture group 1 (i.e. \1):
$pattern = '~\b(\w+) \1 \K\1(?: \1)*\b ?~';
$replacement = '';
$str = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $str);
Note that since the \K removes all that have been matched on the left from the match result, the two first occurences are not replaced.
You could use PHP's explode like this: $wordArray = explode ( " ", $string);
$wordArray will now contain one element for each space-delimited word in the original string.
You could then say something like:
$i = 0;
while ($wordArray[$i] == $wordToCheck) {
$i++;
}
At that point, $i will tell you how many occurrences of $wordToCheck are at the beginning of the string. After that, PHP's array_shift will remove elements from the front of the array, and, after you've shifted out enough words to leave only two, the implode function will turn the array back into a string.
Edited to add: I have not used regular expressions; I'm not sure how to do that, and I am sure you don't need to.
Edited again: This has been tested, and will work even if the first "word" of the string is not $wordToCheck:
<?php
$wordToCheck = "abc";
$string = "abc abc abc abc Hello World abc abc abc My name is abc";
$wordArray = explode ( " ", $string);
$i = 0;
while ($wordArray[$i] == $wordToCheck) {
$i++;
}
for ($j=0; $j < $i-2; $j++) {
array_shift($wordArray);
}
$string = implode(" ",$wordArray);
echo $string;
?>
$string = "abc abc abc abc Hello World abc abc abc My name is abc";
print preg_replace("/abc abc abc( abc)*/","abc abc",$string);