Searches subject for a match to the regular expression given in pattern.
If matches is provided, then it is filled with the results of search. $matches[0] will contain the text that matched the full pattern, $matches[1] will have the text that matched the first captured parenthesized subpattern, and so on.
flags can be the following flag:
The flags parameter is available since PHP 4.3.0 .
preg_match() returns the number of times pattern matches. That will be either 0 times (no match) or 1 time because preg_match() will stop searching after the first match. preg_match_all() on the contrary will continue until it reaches the end of subject. preg_match() returns FALSE if an error occured.
Do not use preg_match() if you only want to check if one string is contained in another string. Use strpos() or strstr() instead as they will be faster.
<?php
// The "i" after the pattern delimiter indicates a case-insensitive search
if (preg_match ("/php/i", "PHP is the web scripting language of choice.")) {
print "A match was found.";
} else {
print "A match was not found.";
}
?><?php
/* The \b in the pattern indicates a word boundary, so only the distinct
* word "web" is matched, and not a word partial like "webbing" or "cobweb" */
if (preg_match ("/\bweb\b/i", "PHP is the web scripting language of choice.")) {
print "A match was found.";
} else {
print "A match was not found.";
}
if (preg_match ("/\bweb\b/i", "PHP is the website scripting language of choice.")) {
print "A match was found.";
} else {
print "A match was not found.";
}
?><?php
// get host name from URL
preg_match("/^(http:\/\/)?([^\/]+)/i",
"http://www.php.net/index.html", $matches);
$host = $matches[2];
// get last two segments of host name
preg_match("/[^\.\/]+\.[^\.\/]+$/", $host, $matches);
echo "domain name is: {$matches[0]}\n";
?>This example will produce:
domain name is: php.netSee also preg_match_all(), preg_replace(), and preg_split().
| This HTML Help has been published using the chm2web software. |