regex - Dynamically Replace Substring With Substring Using PHP -

i have body of text stored string. there multiple substrings want replace substring of substring. typical substring want replace (note there multiple substrings want replace).

$string = "loads of text [[gibberish text|text want]] more text  [[gibberish text|text want]] more text [[if no separator  remove tags]]";  $string = deletestringbetweenstrings("[[", "|", $string , true); 

deletestringbetweenstrings recursive function delete code between 2 substrings (including substrings) want first substring goes bit crazy after this.

function deletestringbetweenstrings($beginning, $end, $string, $recursive) {     $beginningpos = strpos($string, $beginning);     $endpos = strpos($string, $end);  if ($beginningpos === false || $endpos === false)  {     return $string; }  $texttodelete = substr($string, $beginningpos, ($endpos + strlen($end)) - $beginningpos);  $string = str_replace($texttodelete, '', $string);  if (strpos($string, $beginning) && strpos($string, $end) && $recursive == true)  {     $string = deletestringbetweenstrings($beginning, $end, $string, $recursive); } return $string; } 

is there more efficient way me this?

expected output = "loads of text text want more text text want more text if no separator remove tags"

something should trick (whilst preserving ability add own start , end strings):

function deletestringbetweenstrings($start, $end, $string) {     // create pattern input , make safe use in regular expression     $pattern = '|' . preg_quote($start) . '(.*)' . preg_quote($end) . '|u';     // replace every occurrence of pattern empty string in full $string     return preg_replace($pattern, '', $string); }   $string = "loads of text [[gibberish text|text want]] more text  [[gibberish text|text want]] more text [[if no separator  remove tags]]";  $string = deletestringbetweenstrings("[[", "|", $string);