combining dynamic text with regular expressions in php

Question

I am experimenting with finding popular keywords using curl, php and regular expressions. I have an array of non-specific nouns that I am matching my keyword search up. So I am looking for words like "the", "and", "that" etc. and taking them out of the keyword search.

so I have an array of words like so:

$wordArr = [the, and, at,....];

and then running something like:

&& preg_match('(\bmyword\w*\b)', $key) == false

how do I combine these two so it loops through the array finding out if any of the words in the array match the regular expression?

I guess I could just do a for loop, but though maybe I could use in_array($wordArr, $key).. or something like that.

Answer 1

$str = "cars and all that stuff";

$a = array("and", "that");

$b = str_replace( $a, '', $str );

echo $b ;

"cars all stuff"

Favour PHP native functions for this when you can, faster.

Answer 2

If the blacklist is not very long (say, lesser than 100 entries), you can build one big regexp out of it:

$stops = '~\\b(' . implode('|', $stopWords) . ')\\b~';

if(preg_match($stops, $text))....