PHP/Regex replace inch character with proper quotation marks

I want to replace inch characters " with proper German quotation marks ???example???.

An example String would be:

$string = `Mein Name ist "Joseph"`

I tried

str_replace("\"", '???', $string) 

but of course it's replacing all of the inch characters with the same quotation mark

Mein Name ist ???Joseph??? 

So I guess I need a regex to somehow replace the inch character before a word with ??? and the inch character after the same word with ??? to get the result

Mein Name ist ???Joseph???

Despite reading how regex works, I can't really figure out how to achieve that.

Any tips would be gladly welcomed, thx!

Solution:

Try something like this,

$re = '/("([^"]*)")/';
$str = 'Mein Name ist "Joseph"';
$subst = '???$2???';

$result = preg_replace($re, $subst, $str);

echo $result;

Check out,

Made this on

Solution:

Here you go. I used a regex to replace the first " and then replaced everything else with the second character.

$string = 'Mein Name ist "Joseph"';
$patterns = array();
$patterns[0] = '/ "/';
$patterns[1] = '/^"/';
$replacements = array();
$replacements[1] = ' ???';
$replacements[0] = '^???';
$str = preg_replace($patterns, $replacements, $string);
$str = str_replace("\"", '???', $str);
echo $str;