Variable names in text?

[Anon]

I'm storing text in a database field that is later pulled out using PHP and displayed in an html page. Basic "dynamic page" stuff so far. But I would also like to store variable names in the text and have those variable names replaced with their actual values which are set in PHP at the top of the page. Example text from database: "You have $vacdays days of vacation" would turn into "You have 21 days of vacation" if I set $vacdays=21 at the top of the page. Is there a way to do this other than search-and-replace?

Thanks you in advance for your response,
David Rock

[Anon]

You could use the eval() function. When you pull the data out of the db, you could eval() it instead of echo()ing it. This gets a little more complicated because your data in the db must be fully formed PHP code. If it's just a few variables here and there I would just do a search and replace. If it's more than that look at eval().