I'm new to PHP & Arrays even though I read a lot of tutorials already. Please be understanding. :)
My intentions: For a fulltext search I'm trying to replace words within a string with custom other words contained in a list of words. It occurs to me that in order to get whole words rather than the found string as part of another word I have to use preg_replace() with a specific pattern instead of str_replace().
My problem: If a certain word is part of the list of words i.e. [apples], I'm trying to replace i.e. [Short text in a fulltext search] with i.e. [Short apples in a fulltext search]. Naturally the final string looks like [Short apples in a fullapples search] or I get some delimiter warnings.
So I'm trying to figure out a pattern for the preg_replace() function to only replace full words and not strings within combines words. And on top of that I'm pulling the word pairs out of an associative array to have a better overview of the list. This is where I'm a novice.
My trials:
$replacements = array(
'text' => 'apples',
etc…
);
$pattern = '#\b'($searchterm)'\b#;
$searchterm = preg_replace(array_keys($replacements), $pattern, $searchterm);
echo $searchterm;
Thank you for your help!