PHP - How to change numbers in a string to letters

Question

I have string like this:

$string = "2 blocks and 4 allerts";

I want to convert the number 2 and 4 into letter, and the output like this:

$output = "two blocks and four allerts;

I have tried to use str_replace() function, but it only works if the string has one number.

function ( $string = "2 blocks and 4 allerts" ) { 
    return str_replace( 2, 'two', $string );
}

Can do with `preg_replace()`. Are you only looking for 0 through 9? — Twisty, Apr 16 '15 at 00:00
Also did you see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11500088/php-express-number-in-words — Twisty, Apr 16 '15 at 00:02
Or also: http://www.karlrixon.co.uk/writing/convert-numbers-to-words-with-php/ — Twisty, Apr 16 '15 at 00:02
See this previous stack overflow post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2447311/convert-a-number-to-its-string-representation — JBzd, Apr 16 '15 at 00:03
How long is your string? What's the largest number you would like to convert? — Xander Luciano, Apr 16 '15 at 00:03
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because you can find this in a number of questions outlined on SO (they are even mentioned in the comments). — nickhar, Apr 16 '15 at 00:29
@nickhar - vote to close as a duplicate, your close reason isn't constructive moving forward — scrowler, Apr 16 '15 at 00:39
@scrowler, I believe this has now been answered of sorts regardless of effort, but yes, point noted. — nickhar, Apr 16 '15 at 00:49

Mostafa Talebi · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-16T11:14:45.197

Your question does not show any effort, however the following might come useful to you:

It very much depends how long your numbers would be? Assuming 0 to 9, you would do this:

$numbers = array(0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9);

$number_words = array('zero', 'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six', 'seven', 'eight', 'nine');

$string = "I have 3 apples.";

$new_string = str_replace($numbers, $number_words, $string);

The above solution is for simple words and replacements.

For instance, for numbers such as 1995445 you should then search for functions one the internet (or write one) which would convert numbers to string.

Here is a good function to do this: http://www.karlrixon.co.uk/writing/convert-numbers-to-words-with-php/

What we do, is first extract the number from the string:

$rule = "/([0-9]+)/";
$string = "I have 2 mobile phones, each containing 2500 messages";
$num_match;

Then we loop through the string. Each time we only replace the first occurred number, capture it, pass it to our number_to_string() function and then get the string, use that returned string in our replace function which is preg_replace(). We utilize preg_replace()'s $limit param to limit replacement only to first occurrence on each iteration:

while( preg_match($rule, $string, $num_match) )
{
    $string = preg_replace("/".$num_match[0]."/", number_to_string($num_match[0]), $string, 1);
}

echo $string;

What I get in my browser is then:

I have two mobile phones, each containing two thousands and five hundred messages

Wow, thank you. The answer is quite enough for helping me to understand my mistakes. Once again I thank you. — Tommy Pradana, Apr 16 '15 at 00:59

PHP - How to change numbers in a string to letters

1 Answers1