Searching a string...advice.

Anon

Hello,

I have a basic newbie question. I want to search a long string and return all the matches. The search is for "abc", but I want to return "abc" AND the next 5 characters.

I have tried a combintation of substr and strstr something like
substr(strstr($input, $search), 0, 5)
but this only returns the 1st occurance of "abc" and disregards all the following ones.

I have also tried
ereg($search, $input)
where $search is "abc....." but this just returns true. Does this function just find the first instance and quit when it finds a match?

Ideally I would like to get all of the matches in an array.

Any suggestions.

mligor

Hi,

just try to use preg_match or preg_match_all functions (preg - perl regular expressions are faster then normal ereg function)..

return value is also true or false, but if is specified 3th parameter you will get all matches in array...

If you need more help, just contact me on email

cu
Igor

slug58

you can use the function strpos()

look here for more details:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.strpos.php

Example:

$str = "hello there how are you";

$var = strpos($str, "re");

the value of $var will be " 9 " (the first 're' is in there) because the first postion is "0" the second position is "1" the third position is "2" etc...

so from this value you should be able to use the substr() function to get what you want.

good luck hope this helps

Anon

Thanks for the reply.

strpos is almost what I need, but I need to find all the occurrances of the query.

Is there an easy way to put all the instances in an array?

I could then loop through the positions and with substr and pull out the information I need.

Thnaks,
Chris