PHP regex replace from string to string

Question

I want to replace a section of a string based that starts with one string and ends with another, and I want the section between also replaced. I think this is possible using regex but I cant' seem to find any decent examples showing this.

For Example:

I have "http://www.website.com" and I want to replace from "www" to "com" with "123xyz".
So"http://www.website.com/something" becomes "http://123xyz/something.

I am assuming I have to use preg_replace(), and I think the regex should start with "^www" and end with "com$", but I cant seem to get a grasp of the syntax of regex enough to create the desired effect.

please help

Answer 1

With reference to your example , you can try like this

$string = 'http://www.website.com/something';
$pattern = '/www(.*)com/';

$replacement = '123xyz';
echo preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);

Answer 2

$phrase       = "http://www.website.com";
$phraseWords  = array("www", "com");
$replaceTo    = array("123xyz", "something");

$result = str_replace($phraseWords, $replaceTo, $phrase);
echo $result;

Answer 3

Thanks so much to both @CodingAnt and @PHPWeblineindia for your great answers. Using @CodingAnt's answer (and some more research I did online) I wrote this function:

function replaceBetween(&$target, $from, $to, $with){
  if(strpos($target, $from)===false)return false;
  $regex = "'".$from."(.*?)".$to."'si";
  preg_match_all($regex, $target, $match);
  $match = $match[1];
  foreach($match as $m) $target = str_replace($from.$m.$to, $with, $target);
  return $target;
}

It seems to work pretty well. I hope someone finds this useful.