Should I call str_replace() with an array of search strings or call str_replace() over and over for each search string?

Question

When converting new line characters to HTML break (<br>)

What is Cleaner to use?

str_replace(array("\r\n", "[br]", "\r"), '<br>', $Content);

OR

str_replace("\r\n", '<br>', $Content);
str_replace("[br]", '<br>', $Content);
str_replace("\r", '<br>', $Content);

I've been using the first method, but a friend of mine said that the way I currently use is more sloppy in terms of processing.

I'm using the formatting in a function; so

function Formatting ($Content)
{
 $Content = str_replace(array("\r\n", "[br]", "\r"), '<br>', $Content);
 return $Content;
}

Answer 1

I would tweak this one myself (from the user notes in the manual page http://php.net/manual/en/function.nl2br.php:

<?php
/**
 * Converts newlines and break tags to an
 * arbitrary string selected by the user,
 * defaults to PHP_EOL.
 *
 * In the case where a break tag is followed by
 * any amount of whitespace, including \r and \n,
 * the tag and the whitespace will be converted
 * to a single instance of the line break argument.
 *
 * @author Matthew Kastor
 * @param string $string
 *   string in which newlines and break tags will be replaced
 * @param string $line_break
 *   replacement string for newlines and break tags
 * @return string
 *   Returns the original string with newlines and break tags
 *   converted
 */
function convert_line_breaks($string, $line_break=PHP_EOL) {
    $patterns = array(   
                        "/(<br>|<br \/>|<br\/>)\s*/i",
                        "/(\r\n|\r|\n)/"
    );
    $replacements = array(   
                            PHP_EOL,
                            $line_break
    );
    $string = preg_replace($patterns, $replacements, $string);
    return $string;
}
?>