Indexed substitution within string - php

Question

I am looking to convert a string with a special HTML tag and parse it accordingly. Below I will show what the original string is followed by what I want the parsed string to be. If someone can direct me towards a proper coding method to make this possible that would be fantastic.
Original String:
$string = '<string 1="Jacob" 2="ice cream">{1} likes to have a lot of {2}.</string>';
Parsed String:
$parsed_string = 'Jacob likes to have a lot of ice cream.';]
EDIT:
I forgot to add that the $string variable may having multiple strings with multiple options, for example the $string variable could be the following:
$string = '<string 1="hot dog">I like to have {1}</string> on <string 1="beach" 2="sun">the {1} with the blazing hot {2} staring down at me.';
I need a solution that can parse the code example above.
EDIT 2:
Here is a sample code I developed that is incomplete and has a few bugs. If there is more than one option e.x. 1='blah' 2='blahblah' it will not parse the second option.
$string = '<phrase 1="Jacob" 2="cool">{1} is {2}</phrase> when <phrase 1="John" 2="Chris">{1} and {2} are around.</phrase>';
preg_match_all('/<phrase ([0-9])="(.*?)">(.*?)<\/phrase>/', $string, $matches);
print $matches[1][0] . '<br />';
print $matches[2][0] . '<br />';
print $matches[3][0] . '<br />';
print '<hr />';
$string = $matches[3][0];
print str_replace('{' . $matches[1][0] . '}', $matches[2][0], $output);
print '<hr />';
print '<pre>';
print_r($matches);
print '</pre>';

Answer 1

As $string is no valid XML (e.g. containing numbers as attribute names), you may try:
$string = '<string 1="Jacob" 2="ice cream">{1} likes to have a lot of {2}.</string>';
$parsed_string = strip_tags($string);
for ($i = 1; $i <= 2; $i++) {
if (preg_match('/' . $i . '="([^"]+)"/', $string, $match))
$parsed_string = str_replace('{' . $i .'}', $match[1], $parsed_string);
}
echo $parsed_string;
UPDATE
Your EDIT switched from having one <string> tag to having multiple <string> tags in the variable now. This one should work for multiples:
$string2 = '<string 1="hot dog">I like to have {1}</string> on <string 1="beach" 2="sun">the {1} with the blazing hot {2} staring down at me.</string>';
$parsed_string2 = '';
$a = explode('</string>', $string2);
foreach ($a as $s) {
$parsed_elm = strip_tags($s);
for ($i = 1; $i <= 2; $i++) {
if (preg_match('/' . $i . '="([^"]+)"/', $s, $match))
$parsed_elm = str_replace('{' . $i .'}', $match[1], $parsed_elm);
}
$parsed_string2 .= $parsed_elm;
}
echo $parsed_string2;

Answer 2

<?php
$rows = array();
$xml = "
<string 1="Jacob" 2="ice cream">{1} likes to have a lot of {2}.</string>
<string 1="John" 2="cream">{1} likes to have a lot of {2}.</string>
"
$parser = xml_parser_create();
xml_parse_into_struct($parser, trim($xml), $xml_values);
foreach ($xml_values as $row){
$finalRow = $row['values'];
foreach ($row['attributes'] as $att => $attval){
$finalRow = str_replace ($finalRow, "{".$att."}", $attval);
}
$rows[] = $finalRow;
}
?>
Here's a version that doesn't use regex, this seemed more straight forward. I don't know how the xml parser would cope with attributes that start with a number though.