title: PHP str_replace with wild card?
body: <p>I know how to use str_replace for simple tasks, like this...</p>
  
  <pre><code>$Header = str_replace('&lt;h2&gt;Animals&lt;/h2&gt;', '&lt;h3&gt;Animals&lt;/h3&gt;', $Header);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But imagine an article stored in a database that includes the following headers:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;h3&gt;Animals&lt;/h3&gt;
  &lt;h3&gt;Plants&lt;/h3&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And you want to change them to this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;h3&gt;&lt;span class="One"&gt;Animals&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;
  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;span class="One"&gt;Plants&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there a way to turn the value between the tags (e.g. Animals, Plants, Minerals, etc.) into a wild card, something like this?:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$Title = str_replace('&lt;h3&gt;*&lt;/h3&gt;', '&lt;h3&gt;&lt;span style="One"&gt;*&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;', $Title);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Or I should ask "What's the best way?" It looks like there are ways to do it, but I'd like to try and find a simple PHP solution before I start wrestling with regular expressions.</p>