preg_grep modifier question

[dub]

what modifiers would be used to just search for a specific string
without making it case sensitive.

So that, if you searched for "thad"

You would retrieve say, "thad" and "THAD" but not "thaddeus"

[xblue]

case-insensitive modifier is i.

I understand you want to find whole words only, not substrings within a word?

\b might be helpful then, this is a word boundary.

[dub]

sweet, worked like a charm. 🙂

One other question however.

Say that the string im searching through is something like this:

thad|||whatever

and ||| is later going to be used as a divider for explosion.

How would I disreguard ||| and everything after it? and just search
things BEFORE the |||?

any idea?