What is the PHP equivalent to Perl's regex alternations?

Question

I'm converting one of my old Perl programs to PHP, but having trouble with PHP's string handling in comparison to Perl.

In Perl, if I wanted to find out if $string contained this, that or the_other I could use:

if ($string =~ /this|that|the_other/){do something here}

Is there an equivalent in PHP?

Answer 1

You can use PHP's preg_match function for a simple regex test.

if ( preg_match( "/this|that|the_other/", $string ) ) { 
    ...
}

Answer 2

In PHP you can use preg_match function as:

if( preg_match('/this|that|the_other/',$string) ) {
  // do something here.
}

Answer 3

You can either use a regular expression (e.g. preg_match):

if(preg_match('/this|that|the_other/', $string))

or make it explicit (e.g. strstr):

if(strstr($string, 'this') || strstr($string, 'that') || strstr($string, 'the_other'))

Answer 4

THanks all, much easier than I feared!