Replace square braced placeholders with HTML hyperlinks using the placeholder value in the URL querystring and as the clickable text

Question

i have a long string like

$str = "this is [my] test [string] and [string] is very long [with] so many pwords]"

i know str_replace function, but when i replace

$str = str_replace( "[", "<a href=\"/story.php?urdu=",$str;
$str = str_replace( "]", "\"></a>", $str;

I got this result

<a href="/index.php?word=test"></a>

but I want this result for each word in []:

<a href="/index.php?word=test">test</a>

Answer 1

You should use preg_replace() for this one.

Code

<?php
    function replace_matches($matches) {
        $text = htmlspecialchars($matches[1]);
        $url = urlencode($matches[1]);
        return "<a href=\"/story.php?urdu={$url}\">{$text}</a>";
    }    
    $str = "this is [my] test [string] and [<script>alert(1)</script>] is very long [with] so many pwords]";
    $str = preg_replace_callback("%\[(.+?)\]%", "replace_matches", $str);

    echo $str;
?>

Working Example