What is the purpose of using eregi_replace in the provided PHP code snippet?

The purpose of using eregi_replace in the provided PHP code snippet is to perform a case-insensitive regular expression search and replace within a string. This function is used to replace a specific pattern with another string in a given text while ignoring the case of the characters.

// Original PHP code snippet using eregi_replace
$original_text = "Hello, World!";
$replaced_text = eregi_replace("hello", "Hi", $original_text);
echo $replaced_text;
```

To fix this issue, we can use the preg_replace function with the 'i' modifier to achieve the same case-insensitive search and replace functionality.

```php
// Fixed PHP code snippet using preg_replace with 'i' modifier
$original_text = "Hello, World!";
$replaced_text = preg_replace("/hello/i", "Hi", $original_text);
echo $replaced_text;