str_ireplace with arrays and excludes and a limit on replacements

In one of my projects the customer demands that their brandname in the content must be followed by the 'Registered' trademark everytime it occurs in the content.

I really don't like this because the elevated ^'®' is very ugly and legally not really necessary. Once per page (somewhere on top) is enough.

I have created a function to somply with their wishes:

function replaceWith($content)
{
    // Array with replacements to use
    // (removes also ® already in the physical content)

    $replaces => [
        '®'         => '',
        'brandname' => 'BRANDNAME<sup>&reg;</sup>'
    ],

    // Array with excludes (I do not want url's etc to change too)
    $excludes => ['a', 'img', 'href']

    list($search, $replace) = array_divide($replaces);

        // Using simplehtmldom to load the DOM
        $html = new \Htmldom();
        $html->load($content);

        if (!empty($html))
        {
            foreach ($html->find('text') as $element)
            {
                if (!in_array($element->parent()->tag, $excludes))
                {
                    $element->innertext = str_ireplace($search, $replace, $element->innertext);
                }
             }
         $result = (string)$html;
     }
    $html->clear();
    return $result;
}

Now I like to change this because I want only the first occurence to be changed instead off all. There is no limit available on str_ireplace. I have found some workarounds but they all work with strings or integers as values, not with arrays as search and replace values.

via Chebli Mohamed