What are some best practices for replacing characters with images in PHP to avoid unintended replacements?

When replacing characters with images in PHP, it's important to use a unique delimiter or placeholder to avoid unintended replacements. One common approach is to use a combination of characters that are unlikely to appear in the original text. This can help prevent replacing parts of words or phrases that were not intended to be replaced.

$text = "Hello, this is a sample text with characters to replace.";
$replacements = array(
    "a" => "<img src='a.png'>",
    "e" => "<img src='e.png'>",
    "i" => "<img src='i.png'>",
    "o" => "<img src='o.png'>",
    "u" => "<img src='u.png'>"
);

foreach ($replacements as $char => $image) {
    $text = str_replace($char, $image, $text);
}

echo $text;