php - Octal to sign in string from array

Question

I want to convert octal sign like 46 to normal sign like &.
The problem is that the input is created with preg_match_all(), put into an array and then retrieved.

If I'd manually input the 46 octal notation into variable with double quotes, like
$input="46";
then PHP would convert it nicely.

But when I have it into an array from preg_match_all(), it returns it unconverted.

I want to convert it because I want to query database (mysql) that have records with "&" sign as ampersand.

Answer 1

there's an interesting replace trick (or rather hack)

$a = 'a 46 b 75 c';
echo preg_replace('~\\(0dd)~e', '"\\$1"', $a);