What are the best practices for handling word boundaries in PHP when replacing specific substrings within a larger text?

When replacing specific substrings within a larger text in PHP, it's important to consider word boundaries to avoid unintended replacements within larger words. One way to handle word boundaries is to use regular expressions with \b to match word boundaries before and after the substring to be replaced. This ensures that replacements only occur at the beginning or end of words. 

$text = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.";
$replace = "fox";
$replacement = "cat";

$pattern = '/\b' . preg_quote($replace, '/') . '\b/';
$new_text = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $text);

echo $new_text; // Output: "The quick brown cat jumps over the lazy dog."

Keywords

PHP word boundaries substrings text manipulation regular expressions

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