CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregexpreg-replacepreg-matchpreg-match-all
user936965
user936965

Reputation:

Regex to match a word, even is there are spaces between letters

I'd like to have a regex to match a word, even if there are spaces between the characters. When I want to match the word test, it should match the following:

test t est t e s t

And so on, but it should not match things like this:

tste te ts s tet

I have this regex: (t[\s]*e[\s]*s[\s]*t[\s]*) But I don't believe that this one is very efficient.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1123

Answers (2)

Wiktor Stribiżew
Wiktor Stribiżew

Reputation: 626845

This is the only way to match such words. You have to consume these spaces, otherwise you won't have a match. Actually, your pattern is the same as

t\s*e\s*s\s*t

If the word appears inside a larger string, you can consider a word boundary version:

\bt\s*e\s*s\s*t\b

NOTE: If only one whitespace is allowed in between each letter, you can use ? quantifier instead of *:

t\s?e\s?s\s?t

Upvotes: 1

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785156

Why not remove all horizontal spaces from input and then match regex:

$input = 't e s t';
$regex = '/\btest\b/i';

preg_match($regex, preg_replace('/\h+/', '', $input), $m);

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions