What is the correct syntax for a regular expression to find multiple occurrences of the same string with preg_match in PHP?
For example find if the following string occurs TWICE in the following paragraph:
$string = "/brown fox jumped [0-9]/";
$paragraph = "The brown fox jumped 1 time over the fence. The green fox did not. Then the brown fox jumped 2 times over the fence"
if (preg_match($string, $paragraph)) {
echo "match found";
}else {
echo "match NOT found";
}
You want to use preg_match_all()
. Here is how it would look in your code. The actual function returns the count of items found, but the $matches
array will hold the results:
<?php
$string = "/brown fox jumped [0-9]/";
$paragraph = "The brown fox jumped 1 time over the fence. The green fox did not. Then the brown fox jumped 2 times over the fence";
if (preg_match_all($string, $paragraph, &$matches)) {
echo count($matches[0]) . " matches found";
}else {
echo "match NOT found";
}
?>
Will output:
2 matches found