CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
ahemberg
ahemberg

Reputation: 27

Match sequence of characters in regular expression

I would like to match a sequence of letters in a string. For instance if I have the letters T B E I want to match all strings that starts with the letter T and contains the letters B and E at least once. The second letter has to appear before the third, and there might be an infinite number of characters between the letters.

That is the letters T B E would match the strings Table, Trouble and Terrible but not Teb.

I'm trying to code this in php by using

$A = 'T';
$B = 'B';
$C = 'E';

$matches = preg_grep('/^'.$A.'.+'.$B.'.+'.$C.'/', $words);

where words is an array containing a list of words. With my way the algorithm works, but I'm not able to find words where there are no letters in between $A $B or $C.

How would I use regular expressions to fix this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2617

Answers (1)

Anirudha
Anirudha

Reputation: 32797

The reason you are not able to find words where there are no letters in between $A $B or $C is because you are using .+ which is trying to match atleast 1 character between $A $B or $C.

Use .* instead of .+

Upvotes: 1

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