Replace Exact Occurrence of Word in PHP?

Question

I need to repeatedly remove certain stop words from articles. Currently I am using the function str_replace to achieve this. As the first argument I use the stop list array

Answer 1

preg_replace with array

$find = array('/\bth\b/', '/\bthe\b/', '/\bthen\b/');
$replace = array('', '', '');

echo $i = preg_replace($find, $replace, $string);

Or

$find = array('/\bth\b/', '/\bthe\b/', '/\bthen\b/');

echo $i = preg_replace($find, "", $string);

Regex match document: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php#89364

\b Match a word boundary