Help with regular expression in PHP

Question

I want to know if a string is in another string at least once.

I want to check if Shadowbox.init then any (optionnal) combisaison of whitespace then ( is inside $myString at least once.

• Shadowbox.init must be found (case sensitive)
• It can be followed by any number of white spaces (spaces, tabs, newlines...)
• The whitespaces or init is then followed by an opening parenthesis (

So far I have:

$matches = preg_match('/Shadowbox.init[\s]*(/', $myString);

Some examples:

/*
Shadowbox.init(); --> OK
Shadowbox.init ( ); --> OK
Shadowbox.init       (foo); --> OK
Shadowbox.init ); --> Bad missing (
Shadowbox.init --> Bad missing (
Shadowbox. init(); --> Bad space after dot
*/

Answer 1

You don't need regex: http://php.net/manual/en/function.strpos.php

Answer 2

You were nearly there:

$matches = preg_match('/Shadowbox\.init\s*\(/', $myString);

You need to escape the parenthesis and the dot. And you don't need to put brackets around \s.