Preg_match_all for global matching in PHP - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Using preg_match_all for Global Matching in PHP

📖 Scenario: You have a paragraph of text and want to find all the words that start with the letter 'a'.

🎯 Goal: Build a PHP script that uses preg_match_all to find all words starting with 'a' in a given text.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a string variable called text with the exact sentence: "An apple a day keeps the doctor away."

Create a variable called pattern that holds the regex pattern to find words starting with 'a' (case-insensitive).

Use preg_match_all with pattern and text to find all matches and store them in matches.

Print the array matches[0] which contains all matched words.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Finding all occurrences of a pattern in text is useful in text analysis, search engines, and data extraction.

💼 Career

Many programming jobs require working with text data and using regular expressions to extract information efficiently.

1

DATA SETUP: Create the text string

Create a string variable called text and set it to the exact sentence: "An apple a day keeps the doctor away."

PHP

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use double quotes to create the string exactly as shown.

2

CONFIGURATION: Create the regex pattern

Create a variable called pattern and set it to the regex pattern "/\ba\w*/i" to find words starting with 'a' (case-insensitive).

PHP

<?php
$text = "An apple a day keeps the doctor away.";
# Your code here

Need a hint?

The pattern /\ba\w*/i means words starting with 'a' ignoring case.

3

CORE LOGIC: Use preg_match_all to find matches

Use preg_match_all with pattern and text to find all matches and store them in a variable called matches.

PHP

<?php
$text = "An apple a day keeps the doctor away.";
$pattern = "/\ba\w*/i";
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use preg_match_all with the pattern, text, and matches variables.

4

OUTPUT: Print the matched words

Print the array matches[0] which contains all matched words using print_r.

PHP

<?php
$text = "An apple a day keeps the doctor away.";
$pattern = "/\ba\w*/i";
preg_match_all($pattern, $text, $matches);
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print_r($matches[0]) to display the matched words array.