search and replace value in PHP array

Question

I was looking for some standard PHP function to replace some value of an array with other, but surprisingly I haven\'t found any, so I have to write my own:

Answer 1

Based on Deept Raghav's answer, I created the follow solution that does regular expression search.

$arr = [
    'Array Element 1',
    'Array Element 2',
    'Replace Me',
    'Array Element 4',
];

$arr = array_replace(
    $arr,
    array_fill_keys(
        array_keys(
            preg_grep('/^Replace/', $arr)
        ),
        'Array Element 3'
    )
);

echo '<pre>', var_export($arr), '</pre>';

PhpFiddle: http://phpfiddle.org/lite/code/un7u-j1pt

Answer 2

If performance is an issue, one may consider not to create multiple functions within array_map(). Note that isset() is extremely fast, and this solutions does not call any other functions at all.

$replacements = array(
    'search1' => 'replace1',
    'search2' => 'replace2',
    'search3' => 'replace3'
);
foreach ($a as $key => $value) {
    if (isset($replacements[$value])) {
        $a[$key] = $replacements[$value];
    }
}

Answer 3

While there isn't one function equivalent to the sample code, you can use array_keys (with the optional search value parameter), array_fill and array_replace to achieve the same thing:

EDIT by Tomas: the code was not working, corrected it:

$ar = array_replace($ar,
    array_fill_keys(
        array_keys($ar, $value),
        $replacement
    )
);