# preg\_replace regex help, questions and issues

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/preg-replace-regex-help-questions-and-issues/271652>\
**Category:** programming\
**Created:** [September 25, 2008, 11:36pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/preg-replace-regex-help-questions-and-issues/271652 "2008-09-25T23:36:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex011/uploads/kirupa/original/3X/6/2/621e5c11736f46532526e61be85940af4230f3e5.png) [@system](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/system)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2008, 11:36pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/preg-replace-regex-help-questions-and-issues/271652/1 "2008-09-25T23:36:59Z")

</div>

Hi all

Hope your all well. I was hope someone could give me a hand with this question.

I’ll explain what i need to do first.

I have a string that contains copy that will be displayed on a web page.  
Now this copy could have links in it or images or any other html tag.  
It also could have key words or tags within it it as well. I need to turn those tags into useful links.

For example my string could look like this.

```php

$string = 'hello world i\'m doing some php coding using regex';

$tags[] = 'php';
$tags[] = 'regex';

```

Now i want the tags to be changed into links.  
So i use this and limit it to the first occurrence in the string of that tag:

```php

	foreach ($tags as $key =>$value)
	{
	$patterns[]= '/\b('.$value')\b/mi';
	$replacements[] = '<a href="#" title="title details" >'.$value.'</a>';
	}

	$string = preg_replace ($patterns, $replacements, $string, 1);

```

This works great to some degree how ever i need it to ignore any tags within html elements such as links or img tags so basically any thing within \<\>\</\>

so if the string looked like this;

```php

$string = 'hello <a href="#" title="#" >coding</a> world \'m doing some php coding using regex and i suck big time';

```

i need it to ignore the tag within the \<a\>\</a\>and move onto the next instance of it.

Any help on this would be great i’m been bashing my brains over the last few days