CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexpreg-match
Sherif Buzz
Sherif Buzz

Reputation: 1226

php regular expression to match 2 digits followed by certain words

I want to detect strings that have a user's age in them, for example :

"I'm 24 years old" "J'ai 25 ans"

So essentially it would look for :

I've used :

/^[0-9]{2} +(ans|year)$/

so far but it only matches very specific strings like "24 year"

Upvotes: 0

Views: 880

Answers (3)

Emma
Emma

Reputation: 27763

Not sure if I have picked the right words, yet you might want to design an expression similar to:

\s+\p{N}{1,3}\s+(?:years?|an(?:née)?s|سنة|سنوات|عاما|साल)

DEMO

The expression is explained on the top right panel of this demo if you wish to explore/simplify/modify it.

Test

$re = '/\s+\p{N}{1,3}\s+(?:years?|an(?:née)?s|سنة|سنوات|عاما|साल)/m';
$str = 'I\'m 24 years old
J\'ai 25 ans
I have 25 year
عندي ٢٣ سنة
I\'m  24  years old
मैं 27 साल का हूँ
J\'ai  25  ans
I have 100  year
أنا 27 عاما
عندي  ٢٣  سنة';

preg_match_all($re, $str, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER, 0);

foreach ($matches as $match) {
    print(trim($match[0]) . "\n");
}

Output

24 years
25 ans
25 year
24  years
27 साल
25  ans
100  year
27 عاما

Upvotes: 0

Barmar
Barmar

Reputation: 782785

Get rid of the ^ and $. They match the beginning and end of the string, so it won't work if you have I am at the beginning or old at the end.

If you want to match whole words, use \b instead.

/\b\d{2} +(ans|years)\b/

And if you want to match numerals other than Arabic, use \d instead of [0-9].

Upvotes: 0

Jan
Jan

Reputation: 43199

One possible approach might be

\b\p{N}+\s+(?:an|year)s?

which could be used for example in a lookahead. See a demo on regex101.com.

Your initial expression uses anchors, that is your substring can only be matched at the beginning and the end.

Upvotes: 1

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