What are some best practices for implementing word highlighting with tooltips in PHP to avoid unintended highlighting within larger words?

When implementing word highlighting with tooltips in PHP, it is important to ensure that the highlighting does not unintentionally highlight parts of larger words. One way to achieve this is by using regular expressions to match whole words only for highlighting. This can be done by using word boundaries (\b) in the regex pattern to ensure that the highlighted text is a standalone word. 

$text = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.";
$wordToHighlight = "sit";

// Use regex with word boundaries to match whole words only
$pattern = "/\b" . preg_quote($wordToHighlight) . "\b/i";
$highlightedText = preg_replace($pattern, "<span class='highlight'>$0</span>", $text);

echo $highlightedText;

Keywords

PHP word highlighting tooltips unintended highlighting string manipulation

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