PHP regex to find values of terms in a string

Question

I am trying to generate a regex that allows me to do the following:

I have a string containing several terms, all which are alphanumeric and maybe some of these special characters: +.#

They are separated by a comma as well.

This is kind of how it looks like:

$string = 'Term1,Term2,Term3,Term4'; ... And so on... (around 60 terms)

I want to be able to get each term and assign it to a variable, because I want to employ a second Regex to a long string, for example:

$secondString = 'This string may contain some terms, such as Term1, or maybe Term2';

So pretty much I want to be able to check if any of the terms in the first string are present in the second string.

I watched the following tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkluES9Rvak

But I just seem to not be able to come up with something.

Thank you so much for your help in advance!

Cheers!

anubhava · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-13 18:36:17Z

1

You can use array_intersect function after splitting strings into tokens:

$string = 'Term1,Term2,Term3,Term4';
$secondString = 'This string may contain some terms, such as Term1, or maybe Term2';

$arr1 = explode(',', $string);
$arr2 = preg_split('/[,\h]+/', $secondString);

$arr = array_intersect(array_map('strtolower', $arr1), array_map('strtolower', $arr2));
print_r($arr);

Output:

Array
(
    [0] => Term1
    [1] => Term2
)

edited Jan 13, 2016 at 18:36

answered Jan 13, 2016 at 17:14

anubhava

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2 Comments

idelara Over a year ago

is this case sensitive? I want it to be case insensitive (?i)

idelara Over a year ago

Thank you so much! It does the job!

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