Replacing the 1st occurence in a string

@bsmbahamasNov 19.2008

i should know this one but don’t.

given a string …

$str = “hello my name is bob.”

how would i replace only the first space character
with some default text $default = “###”;

so $str would become “hello###my name is bob.”

i tried str_replace but it seems it will always replace all occurences

thanks

to post a comment

PHP

@NogDogNov 19.2008 — #preg_replace() has a limit parameter you could use.

[code=php]
 $text = preg_replace('/ /', '###', $text, 1);
 [/code]

@bsmbahamasauthorNov 19.2008 — #thanks nogdog, you're always rescuing me.

much appreciated.

@bsmbahamasauthorNov 19.2008 — #would it be difficult to have php perform a google search, and then parse the results and return only the amount of results google found?

for example a search for coffee mugs returns 6,220,000.

i just want the results not the listings.

@SyCoNov 20.2008 — #Well this works but only for sure as of today. You'd have to keep an eye on the format of the HTML surrounding the result, if it changes you're out of luck. Maybe there's an API solution but for a straight up cURL and parse, it'll get a number. I imagine someone can improve upon it?

[code=php]<?php
 
 $searchterms='whatever you want';
 
 $url = "http://www.google.com/search?q=".urlencode($searchterms);
 $ch = curl_init();    // initialize curl handle
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url); // set url to post to
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 1);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);// allow redirects
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1); // return into a variable
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10); // times out after 10s
 $result = curl_exec($ch); // run the whole process
 curl_close($ch); 
 
 $pattern="/of about .*> for </";
 $found=preg_match($pattern,$result,$matches);
 $temp=str_replace('of about <b>','',$matches[0]);
 $num=str_replace('</b> for <','',$temp);
 echo $num;
 
 ?> [/code]

@bsmbahamasauthorNov 20.2008 — #thanks that works perfectly, i'll have to do some research into that curl function

@SyCoNov 20.2008 — #cURL is a really neat tool. Remember this is a fairly fragile way to do things but, hey it works (for now) ?

Replacing the 1st occurence in a string

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