Convert comma to semi-colon for the certain part of the string using PHP

Question

I have a string which is such like,

$input = "div-item-2,4,maintype:social| heading:sdfsdf| social: 1, 2, 3 | table:Social| item:3| align:vertical| style:icon| isactive:1,8,0";

I would like to convert comma to semi-colon between | is start and end. This can be illustrated below by the below image,

So the string will be converted as as below,

$output = "div-item-2,4,maintype:social| heading:sdfsdf| social: 1; 2; 3 | table:Social| item:3| align:vertical| style:icon| isactive:1,8,0";

There are some other example is below,

$input = "div-item-0,4,maintype:menu| heading:Quick, Link| table:Menu | menuid:1| align:vertical| style:icon| isactive:1,0,0";

$output = "div-item-0,4,maintype:menu| heading:Quick; Link| table:Menu | menuid:1| align:vertical| style:icon| isactive:1,0,0";

Same case can be below,

$input = "div-item-1,4,maintype:text| heading: Name | title: Learn from here| logo:/photos/20/01.jpg| description: This is some description, so you can stay with us| isactive:1,4,0";

$output= "div-item-1,4,maintype:text| heading: Name | title: Learn from here| logo:/photos/20/01.jpg| description: This is some description; so you can stay with us| isactive:1,4,0";

Answer 1

You can use this regex to do what you want:

((\||(?<!^)\G)[^,|]*),(?=.*\|)

It looks for

• either a |, or the start of the string after the previous match (\G),
• followed by some number of non | or , characters,
• followed by a ,
• followed by some number of characters then a |

Demo on regex101

Note that \G would normally also match the start of string, the negative lookbehind (?<!^) prevents it doing that.

The characters between the start of match and the , are captured in group 1, and the replacement string is $1;. In PHP:

echo preg_replace('/((\||(?<!^)\G)[^,|]*),(?=.*\|)/', '$1;', $input);

Demo on 3v4l.org