Regex

[baileylo]

Hey,
I'm a little new with regex as I always seem to be. My question in general is i want to do a string search based off a regular expression.
So say I want to validate what is in a string, not match the string.

Example:
I want "foo bar" to return false but "foo.bar" to return true. My orginal attempt was something along the lines of

preg_match("([A-Za-z.-_]+)", "Foo Bar") 

This was stopping after it found Foo. I want to set it to check the entire string.

I thought I should change teh regex to something like
"^([A-Za-z.-_]+)$" But that was not working. COuld somebody help me.

[shoorace]

Try this:

echo preg_match("(^[A-Za-z.-_]+$)", "Foo Bar", $matches);
print_r($matches);
echo preg_match("(^[A-Za-z.-_]+$)", "Foo.Bar", $matches);
print_r($matches); 

[crmalibu]

the preg_* functions use PCRE regex.
You must use a delimiter with PCRE regex to seperate the actual expression from the optional flags. I used the D flag, otherwise it would allow the string to end in a newline character.

echo preg_match("/^[A-Za-z.-_]+$/D", "Foo Bar", $matches);
print_r($matches); 

http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html