$re = '~\b(https?://\S*?/documents/)en(/\S*)\.pdf\b~';
$str = 'The problem is, if the page contains a PDF linked to another page (not my own website), example https://othersite.example.com/whatever.pdf, it becomes https://othersite.example.com/whatever_SPANISH.pdf which isn\'t valid on other people\'s sites. I want to ignore offsite links and only change URLs on my site.
So what I would like to do is look for the string: https://example.com/documents/en/whateverfilename.pdf and pull that file name out and change it to https://example.com/documents/es/whateverfilename_SPANISH.pdf (Switching the en to es and also appending the _SPANISH to the end of the PDF filename.
';
$subst = "$1es$2_SPANISH.pdf";
$result = preg_replace($re, $subst, $str);
echo "The result of the substitution is ".$result;
Please keep in mind that these code samples are automatically generated and are not guaranteed to work. If you find any syntax errors, feel free to submit a bug report. For a full regex reference for PHP, please visit: http://php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php