Search String ignoring spaces

[millercj]

I'm trying to search a string for a certain syntax (to ultimately get the number of occurrences). I want to ignore spaces but I'm unsure of the best way to do that. Here is my code right now

 

<?PHP
$homepage = file_get_contents('http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/ldnews/obituary-browse.aspx?page=1&recentdate=0&entriesperpage=50');

$substring = '<div> <b>';

$substringCount = substr_count($homepage, $substring);
echo $substringCount;

 

another way I could accomplish what i'm trying to do is if there's a way to search for text that includes a wild card such as Taglist2Alpha, where the number is the wildcard

 

something similar to $substring = 'Taglist*Alpha';

[Ken2k7]

Check out preg_match and preg_match_all.