preg_match

(PHP3 >= 3.0.9, PHP4 )

preg_match -- Perform a regular expression match

Description

int preg_match (string pattern, string subject [, array matches])

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 match the full pattern, $matches[1] will have the text that matched the first captured parenthesized subpattern, and so on.

Returns true if a match for pattern was found in the subject string, or false if not match was found or an error occurred.

Example 1. find the string of text "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.";
}
      

Example 2. find the word "web"


// 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.";
}
      

Example 3. Getting the domain name out of a URL


preg_match("/^(.*)([^\.]+\.[^\.]+)(\/.*)?/U",
           "http://www.php.net/index.html", $matches);
// show the second parenthesized subpattern
echo "domain name is: ".$matches[2]."\n"; 
      
This example will produce:

domain name is: php.net
     
See also preg_match_all(), preg_replace(), and preg_split().