Help With Php! A question that needs an answer

Hey,
I am currently making a program with php and I need to know an answer - I need to know the wildcard for all.
It may sound stupid, I know it is *(asterisk) but does php support it?

if ($var="Sometext".*) {  //code here}

Will that work? Any other solutions?

Thanks in advance,
souradipm
Edited August 19, 2006 by souradipm (see edit history)

What about testing this syntax on your own PC ?
You download "easy php" from http://www.easyphp.org/ , the installation lasts half a minute, and you have a working webserver with php, then you put your program in a subfoler of the "www" folder and you test it !
Of course, waiting for an answer in this forum may give a faster answer, however having a working testing environment is usually very interesting.
Regards
Yordan

Thing is, my computer is a family PC and I don't want to turn it into a webserver. Also, this code is actually part of a larger program, making it so that I have to complete the program to actually test it out.~souradipm

Unless someone knows better than me, I think the solution will require some pattern matching using a regular expression.

 

This will probably confuse you:

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

This is the example that best matches your situation:

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php

<?php// The "i" after the pattern delimiter indicates a case-insensitive searchif (preg_match("/php/i", "PHP is the web scripting language of choice.")) {   echo "A match was found.";} else {   echo "A match was not found.";}?> 

 

Of course, you'll need a reg_ex for your situation:

 

I think this will work for you:

 

"/sometext\.([^ ]*)/i"

All together:

if (preg_match("/sometext\.([^ ]*)/i", "sometext.html")) {   echo "A match was found.";}

This will match anything after "sometext." except a space! So "sometext.%$^%" is ok but "sometext. Hello" is not!

 

You should try to specify what the extention sould be.

Like any letter or number only would be:

"/sometext\.([A-Za-z0-9-]{1,})/i"

Which means match at least "1" of any upper or lower case letter or number.

The upside to that is that it will end at either a whitespace or some non-alpha-numeric character like a punctuation mark or special character.

 

If you want to specify that the extention is at least 3 characters long then use this:

"/sometext\.([A-Za-z0-9-]{3,})/i"

If you want more leadway on the size of the extention, you could specify between 2 and 4 characters like this:

"/sometext\.([A-Za-z0-9-]{2,4})/i"

For exactly 3 characters long only, use this:

"/sometext\.([A-Za-z0-9-]{3})/i"

I hope this helps.

 

vujsa