Multiple Words, Any Order

[bsmither]

I found this regex, which is what I want, here:

 

(?=.*\bdog\b)(?=.*\bpuppet\b)(?=.*\bfuzzy\b)

It is suppose to 'succeed' if it can find all the given words in any order.

 

Yet, when I try to test it against this sequence of words (or any other order of these words):

 

need fuzzy hand puppet in dogpen for dog

I get no indication of a match.

 

What am I not understanding?

[requinix]

I think regexpal can't handle it.

 

[bsmither]

Interesting. Other than using your browser's javascript console, do you (or anyone here) have a console app that succeeds in showing a true result?

 

Such as:

http://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/282231-at-last-regexbuddy-4-released/

 

Personally, I tried with The Regex Coach (v0.9.2, copyright 2008, Dr. Edmund Weitz) and Rad Software Regular Expression Designer (v1.4, copyright 2007, Ross Donald). May be I don't know how to use the Rad Software app.

[requinix]

Command-line?

$ php -r "var_dump(preg_match('/(?=.*\bdog\b)(?=.*\bpuppet\b)(?=.*\bfuzzy\b)/', 'need fuzzy hand puppet in dogpen for dog'));"
int(1)

It works.

[bsmither]

Thank you for your assistance with this. It has proved to be enlightening,

 

To close this out, the expression I needed is to be used in a MySQL query. From the actual source code I was trying to modify, I knew the word boundary indicator is different. But there is more.

 

I have also come to learn MySQL uses the POSIX language for it's RE engine, which means there is no lookahead.

 

However, regardless of whether it is efficient or not, I will probably have to use:

 

(`abc` RLIKE expr1) AND (`abc` RLIKE expr2) AND ...