Re: Finding first/last occurrence of a substring

On Mon, 2005-01-17 at 09:27, Vikram Vaswani wrote: > Hi > I have a string like this: > ---- > Just when you begin to think the wagon of Vietnam-grounded movies is grinding to a slow halt, > you’re hit squarely in the face with another one. However, while other movies depict the gory and > glory of war and its effects, this centres on the psychology of troopers before they're led to > battle. > ---- > I need to know the index position of every occurrence of the pattern "the" in the > string above, and replace it with something else. Specifically, I need the position of the last, > first and third occurrences of "the". > > I'm totally lost as to how to do this. Could someone help me out? > do you want to replace them or just find the position in the string? There are functions for both try looking at the manual for preg_replace: http://www.php.net/preg_replace looks like $replacedstr = preg_replace('/the/','whatever',$origstr,3); would replace the first three occurances of the with whatever in the string contained in $origstr and place it in $replacedstr. HTH Bret