Is it possible in PHP Regex to do partial matching so that if I have an array like:
$words = array("john", "steve", "amie", "kristy", "steven");
and I supply "jo" it would return "john" or if "eve" is supplied, it returns "steve"?
3 Answers
$words = array("john","jogi", "steve", "amie", "kristy", "steven");
foreach ($words as $value) {
if (preg_match("|jo|", $value)) {
$arr[] = $value;
}
}
var_dump($arr);
This will return you array with john and jogi
4 Comments
Poonam
it is working , tell me one thing for eve will return steve and steven na? or you want only first match answer would be returned..
dukevin
did you see the codepad link? I used codepad to execute your php code and it returns "null" and several warnings
Poonam
I am sorry @dukevin ,I don't know why its not working in codepad ,but I am bit confident it is working in php ,I have tested using netbeans and php.
Poonam
I found some post based on warning just go through it stackoverflow.com/questions/8859363/…
If you only need to find a substring, either use strpos (for case-sensitive search) or stripos for case-insensitive search.
If you need regex, then you can specify wildcards at both ends: /.*jo.*/ which will force it to always match "dojo", "jo", "joe", "dojos", etc.
To search in an array for your pattern, look at preg_grep - this lets you pass in a regex (/.*jo.*/) as the first parameter, and an array as the second ($words), and returns any elements which match your regex.
4 Comments
Gumbo
That just makes processing the regular expression more expensive.
Joe
I don't think he's worried about efficiency, from the answer he's accepted
Gumbo
That doesn’t mean you should propose inefficient solutions.
Joe
Well I'm sorry for trying to offer advice. I'll know better next time.
You could iterate through your array and match your items using preg_match.
If you don't supply a ^ and $ it automatically does partial matching.
answered Feb 10, 2012 at 8:22
Marc-Christian Schulze
3,2844 gold badges38 silver badges46 bronze badges
strpos("john", "jo")?jo. So iterate over the array and see wherestrpos()doesn't returnFalse. I fail to see the problem.