String contains multiple words
There are several ways to determine if a given string contains a specific word in PHP. It depends on the program context we are solving.
As we are here to check that a PHP string contains multiple words, therefore, assuming that you are already aware of a single word search within the string. Therefore first we will see how to check if a string contains any word in short.
One of the best ways to check single word using PHP function strpos
Example:
$searchText = "QuizCure";
$givenString = "Programming articles listed on QuizCure belongs to java, python, PHP and more";
if(strpos($givenString, $searchText) !== false){
echo "QuizCure text Found!";
} else{
echo "QuizCure text Not Found!";
}
Result: QuizCure text Found!
Explanation:
- strpos is used to check the position of the first existence of a search word
- strpos is case-sensitive. Therefore it will match the same case letters only.
- In our example above we have searchText as QuizCure and the given string also contains the same set of upper and lowercase combinations of word QuizCure.
-
strpos($givenString, $searchText)return false if it doesn't find the searchText position in the given string. Therefore I used criteriastrpos($givenString, $searchText) !== falseto test.
Now let's explore how can we check string containing more than one word in a given string in the following ways
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Check if the string contains multiple words using the preg_match function
preg_match function is used to perform searches for regular expression patterns on passing strings.
Syntax:
preg_match($pattern, $givenString, $matchesFound, $flags, $offset)
- $pattern: Required param. Pattern to check in a given string
- $givenString: Required Param. givenString is text in which search for patterns needs to be performed.
- $matchesFound: Its optional parameter. It will be populated with search results if this param is provided.
- $flags: Optional param.
- $offset: Optional param.
-
Return:
1 => If pattern matched
0=> If pattern doesn't meet
False => Once failed
Our objective here is to find regular expressions to match with multiple words on a given text. Let's explore in following example code
$pattern = "(Quizcure|programming|java)";
$givenString = "Programming articles listed on Quizcure belongs to python, java, PHP and more";
var_dump(preg_match($pattern, $givenString));
Result: int(1)
Explanation:
- We need to construct a regular expression for multi-words by separating using | symbol as
(Quizcure|programming|java) - Therefore it returns 1 if any of the word patterns matched in the given string. In our case, all used words are part of a given string.
Case1: one of three words matched only
$pattern = "(Quizcure|abc|xyz)";
$givenString = "Programming articles listed on Quizcure belongs to python, java, PHP and more";
var_dump(preg_match($pattern, $givenString));
Result: int(1)
Case 2 : None matched
$pattern = "(demo|abc|xyz)";
$givenString = "Programming articles listed on Quizcure belongs to python, java, PHP and more";
var_dump(preg_match($pattern, $givenString));
Result: int(0)
Check case-insensitive multiple matching using preg_match function
In the previous example, we learned about multiple word matching using regex. It was a case-sensitive operation.
Now we will see a case-insensitive multiple word matching demonstration.
$pattern = "/(quizcure|abc|java)/i";
$givenString = "Programming articles listed on QuizCure belongs to java, python, PHP and more";
var_dump(preg_match($pattern, $givenString));
Result: int(1)
Program Explanation:
imodifier in Regular expression is used here to ignore-case.-
/(quizcure|abc|java)/iwith i doesn't care whether the input string contains the word Capital letter, lower or mixed letter. -
output of
preg_match($pattern, $givenString)will be 1 once any word matched from the string for a given pattern/(quizcure|abc|java)/i. In our example here it matched with word quizcure hence returning 1
