Can I use %category% like Templates in my Plugin?

Question

I have seen that Wordpress uses %category% like strings to create url templates. Is there an easy way to allow such mechanism in a plugin? For example in the plugin's settings page user specifies an option

`<a href=%my_url%>Click here</a>`

And in my plugin I replace %my_url% with an actual URL before echoing it.

Is there a function/mechanism in wordpress that I can use to achieve this?

Answer 1

You don't need anything WordPress specific here. Use PHP's str_replace to replace tokens entered by users in the settings. In your plugin code, wherever you are echoing the setting value wrap it in str_replace with the value you want to replace %my_url% with.

echo str_replace("%my_url%", $real_url_value, $setting_text);