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Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions

by David Stanley

Regular expressions are matching patterns. First you tell the script what you want to search for and where, then it will try to find it. If the search is a success, a TRUE value will appear. If the search is a failure, a FALSE value will appear.

A pattern is what you are looking for in a specific area. It can be a word, a letter, whatever. For our examples, we will use the letter z.

There are two commands to use for searching. ereg for doing a case sensitive search (for specifically a lower or upper case letter) or eregi for doing a case insenitive search (searching for either a lower or upper case letter).

The ereg command takes two properties. One for the pattern to search for, the second for the search area.

ereg

<?php
$pattern = "z";
$search_area = "My car goes ZOOM.";
$search_result = ereg($pattern,$search_area);

if ($search_result){
// print this if there is a true result.
echo "Success, the pattern was found!";
} else {
// print this if there is a false result.
echo "Failure, the pattern was not found!";
}
?>

result :

Failure, the pattern was not found!

eregi

<?php
$pattern = "z";
$search_area = "My car goes ZOOM.";
$search_result = eregi($pattern,$search_area);

if ($search_result){
// print this if there is a true result.
echo "Success, the pattern was found!";
} else {
// print this if there is a false result.
echo "Failure, the pattern was not found!";
}
?>

result :

Success, the pattern was found!

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Article by David Stanley. Visit his site http://www.htmlite.com. Reprinted with permission.

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