too long

Question

I have made a script to highlight a word in a string. The script is below.

function highlight_text($text, $words){
  $split_words = explode( " " , $words );
  foreach ($split_words as $word){
    $color = '#FFFF00';
    $text = preg_replace("|($word)|Ui", "<span style=\"background:".$color.";\">$1</span>", $text );
  }
  return $text;
}

$text = '*bc';
$words = '*';

echo highlight_text($text, $words);

When running the script, I got the following error:

Warning: preg_replace(): Compilation failed: nothing to repeat at offset 1

Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

change "*" to "\*" and profit.