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

This should work:

$i = $string;
foreach($swarray as $word) {
  $i = str_replace(" " . $word . " ", "", $i );
}

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

You need to instead use preg_replace with word boundaries. For example below we're only replacing word the while avoiding replacing them or then etc

$string = preg_replace('/\bthe\b/', '', $string);