What am I doing wrong in this php regular expression?-CodePudding

Hello everyone currently I have a problem that I don't know what could be the cause, what I want to do is to know if an element of an array has a certain word, and I use this regular expression /.*example.*/, and this is the code:

$array = ['example1', '2example', 'no'];

$matches = [];
$var = "example";

foreach($array as $element)
{
      preg_match("/.*$var.*/", $element, $matches);
}

But when I run that code and see the value of $matches it is an empty array. What am I doing wrong? I appreciate your help, thanks in advance :D.

CodePudding user response：

That's because you are looping through your $array and probably print the result after the loop.

So $matches just includes the matching elements of the last item in your $array. But because 'no' is the last element, and it doesn't fulfill the regex requirements, $matches is empty.

To have a better understanding of what is happening, try to use print_r($matches) within your loop, after you called preg_matches().

And after that, try to call it after your loop and see the difference.

CodePudding user response：

You need two variables. One is the result of the current match, and another is a list of all the matches. After each call you can push the result of the current match to the list.

$array = ['example1', '2example', 'no'];

$matches = [];
$var = "example";

foreach($array as $element)
{
    if (preg_match("/.*$var.*/", $element, $match)) {
        $matches[] = $match[0];
    }
}

print_r($matches);