Matching full text from string with php regular expression

Question

Lets say I have sentence like this: "Hello world this is a test". In this sentence I want to match with "world test" or "hell this" something like that. How can I do this with preg_match? This is probably something like mysql fulltext search.

$str = "Hello world this is a test";
$src1 = "world test";
$src1 = "hell this";

Answer 1

You can use \\b for defining boundaries as

/\b(world\stest|hell\sthis)/

Explanation

1. \\b assert position at a word boundary
2. (world\\stest|hell\\sthis) this'll check for world test or hell this

Answer 2

<?php
$str = "Hello world this is a test";
$src1 = 
$src1 = str_replace(' ','.*',$src1);
preg_match("/(.*$src1.*)/i", $str, $results);

print_r($results);
?>

Answer 3

I have tried this, and looks like its working for me:

$searchword = str_replace(" ", "|", $src1);
preg_match_all("/$searchword/i", $str)

Many thanks for your help.

Answer 4

You should combine two expressions: world.*test and hell.*this . Resulting expression is world.*test|hell.*this . (FIY .* matches any number of any character).

PS: You can also consider using CleanRegex :

$str = "Hello world this is a test";

if (pattern('world.*test|hell.*this')->matches($str)) 
{
    // Matched! :)
}