Do I need to use regular expressions?

zzz

I have a snippet of code that detects whether a string contains a semicolon a or not:

if (ereg(";",$str)) { }

How can I also expand on that and see if either a semicolon or a comma present?.. After looking around I suppose I need to use regular expressions here. Or am I getting it all wrong?

😕

devinemke

you do not need regex for this

$string = 'this string has a semicolon; and a comma,';
if (strpos($string, ';') !== false || strpos($string, ',') !== false)
{
	echo 'semicolon or comma was found';
}

zzz

Perfect.

I was actually thinking of something like: ^[, ;] but i'm not sure about that sort of things...

zzz

One more question. Can I add an exeption or two?

Let's say I want to exclude the following:

, MD

, M.D.

How would i integrate that in the code

Swardh

I would recommend regexp to do the whole thing for ya 😃

This preg_match, finds...
;
:
, MD
, M.D.

<?php
$string = "bla bla bla, here is some text with , MD in it...";

if(preg_match('/(;|:|, MD|, M\.D\.)/s', $string)) {
echo("Found it!");
}
?>