strict replace

[hearn]

I need to go through a string and replace "a" with "b", and I tried using string_replace, however, here is my problem:

Say I want to replace "the" with "stuff".
This works for "the", but it also works for "other", etc.
So if i try to replace "the" with "stuff" and "other" apperas in the string, it replaces it as "ostuffr".

I need to be able to replace ONLY the in a string, and no other matches. How do I do this without replacing other occurances?

If it matters the string also containts html and javascript code... basically I'm writing a translation engine to translate websites... the code works, but the easiester part (replacing) is the only thing I can't get.

Thanks in advance, sorry about the long message!

[drew010]

either try
str_replace($string, " the ", " stuff ");
//the space will eliminate other, them, theme etc from being detected.

or try
preg_replace("/\bthe\b/", "other", $string);

use regex to find and replace the word, \b for boundary will only match the exact word and not a substring of another word.