str_ireplace but not within a link tag
 

I am trying to do a str_ireplace on a long string that can contain links. However I dont want to replace an occurance if it within a <a></a> tags.

The way I was thinking was to explode the string into parts based on the link. so I want the first piece to contain a part of the string part 2 to contain the link part 3 to contain more of the string. Then I can loop through skipping every other part them implode it all back together.

The problem is that I cannot set a wildcard (or just dont know how) within my str_ireplace tag. I would want something like str_ireplace("<a*</a>", $string); where the * is a wild card.

Any ideas?

This is the part when you would use regular expressions. Capture the parts you don't want to make replacements into, replace all the other parts, and recompose the string.