wild card character in php

[juschillinnow]

Ok, I know that % is the wild card when doing 'like' searches with MySQL.

But is there a wild card for just regular php.

for example....

$this = "hellos";
$that = "hello";

if($this like '%$that%')
{
echo "YES";
}

is there a way to do something like that?

[tomhath]

Regular expressions are the wildest of wildcards:

http://www.phpbuilder.com/manual/function.preg-match.php