jokers?

[Anon]

I cannot find anywhere how to write joker signs in PHP
for example if i want all words starting with the letter "b" and ends with the letter "k". Something like "b%k" or something?

[[deleted]]

Well what are you searching in?

[Anon]

I am searching in a mysql database

[Anon]

you need to make more sense

[junebug]

select * from table where field like "b%k"

[Anon]

no I don't mean the SQL command

sorry i made a mistake I am not searching in a mysql database

i have a string looking like this

bread,egg,milk,cheeze.... and so on

and i want to select all words which starts with a certain letter like all food starting with a "b". Therefore i want to know if there are wildcards in PHP which symbolize one or more letters no matter what the letters are! LIKE the wildcards used in SQL commands "%" and "_".

[[deleted]]

Searching strings is easiest with regular expressions.
Unfortunately regexps are also quite cryptic.

look at preg_match() in the manual, you could do something like

preg_match("\b(b.*?)\b/",$string,$aMatches);
print_r($aMatches);

or you could use arrays:
$array=explode(',',$string);
for ($t=0;$t<count($array);$t++)
{
if (substr($array[$t],0,1)=='b')
{
echo $array[$t]." begins with a b\n";
};
};

[Anon]

#sorry i made a mistake I am not searching
#in a mysql database

you really should just do it in the database... it wastes a lot of resources to pipe a ton of data from mysql to php, and then have php figure out what it wants when mysql could have done it in the first place.

if you are parsing new data though, regular expressions are the obvious answer...

something like ereg("^{b+k+$",$string)} i believe would return what you want