正则表达式：匹配包含序列的单词

Question

I am trying to match words containing the following: eph gro iss

I have eph|gro|iss which will match eph gro iss in this example: new grow miss eph . However I need to match the whole word. For example it should match all of the miss not just iss and grow not just gro Thanks

Answer 1

You can do it like this:

\b(\w*(eph|gro|iss)\w*)\b

How it works:

The expression is bracketed with word-boundary anchors \\b , so it only matches whole words. These words must contain one of the literals eph , gro or iss somewhere, but the \\w* parts allow the literals to appear anywhere within the whole word.

The important thing here is that you need to adopt some specific definition for "words". If you are OK with the regex definition that words are sequences that match [a-zA-Z0-9_]+ then you can use the above verbatim.

If your definition of word is something else, you will need to replace the \\b anchors and \\w classes appropriately.

Answer 2

Try this:

\b([a-zA-Z]*(?:eph|gro|iss)[a-zA-Z]*)\b

Breakdown:

• \\b - word boundary
• ( - start capture
• [a-zA-Z]* - zero or more letters
• (?:eph|gro|iss) - your original regex, non-capturing
• [a-zA-Z]* - zero or more letters
• ) - end capture
• \\b - word boundary

Example output:

php > $string = "new grow miss eph";
php > preg_match_all("/\b([a-zA-Z]*(?:eph|gro|iss)[a-zA-Z]*)\b/", $string, $matches);
php > print_r($matches);
Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => grow
            [1] => miss
            [2] => eph
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => grow
            [1] => miss
            [2] => eph
        )

)