preg_replace for a word ending with a colon

Question

I've tried looking into preg_replace, except that I have not much experience with regular expressions. What I'm trying to do is replace a portion of text ending with a colon and make it bold and put a line break in before and 2 line breaks after. IE convert this text ``` title1: is some text here. title2: another piece of text. ``` to ``` **title1:** is some text here. **title2:** another piece of text ``` I've tried doing something like this... ``` preg_replace("!\*(.*?)\*!$:","\
\!\*(.*?)\*!\<\/strong\>\
",$text); ``` I can't seem to get it to work. Can anyone help? Thanks Andi

Accepted Answer

`preg_replace` regexes need to be delimited. So, first, try encasing your regex in slashes. Second, I don't understand your regex. Something simple like `/(\w+):/` should work. ``` preg_replace("/(\w+):/", "

$1
", $text); ``` @AndiLeeDavis Edited answer to handle multi-word titles and get rid of extraneous breaks at the beginning: ``` $mtext = preg_replace("/\.?\s*([^\.]+):/", "

$1
", $text); if (strcmp(substr($mtext, 0, 8), "

") == 0) $mtext = substr($mtext, 8); ```

preg_replace for a word ending with a colon

Solution

Problem