Scanning a page

[lihman]

I need to scan a page for certain words. If the page has those words, then i want to perform a certain action and if not, then a different action. However, I don't need all of the words to be present on the page, just one of them.

 

How would I do that?

 

For example, if the words that I wanted to look for are:

 

Green

Blue

Red

 

and $result contained:

 

The blue cat was big.

 

I want if(preg_match.....

 

to say yes even though red and green weren't present.

 

Would I use preg_match or preg_match_all or something else? I basically need like an 'OR' between the terms I am looking for in $result.

[cags]

The simplest solution would be to use alternation, which by definition basically means 'OR'.

 

if( preg_match( '#(?:Green|Blue|Red)#i', $input ) ) {
   // do action
} else {
   // do other action
}

[.josh]

might have to benchmark it and it certainly depends on how big the subject is (and in the end of the day diff might be too small to care...) but in general if you are just wanting to check a string within a string (not looking to match a pattern) the built-in string search functions are faster.  strpos, stripos, strstr or stristr, etc...

[GoneNowBye]

#(?:Green|Blue|Red)#i was given above

 

what does the # do and is the i at the end a qualifier of any description?

[cags]

The hashes are delimiters, all PCRE patterns must have delimiters (in much the same way a string must be delimited with " or '). The i is a modifier, more specifically the case insensitive modifier.

 

PCRE

[GoneNowBye]

thanks