PHP IF with wildcard

3 posts by 2 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: December 23, 2008   (RSS)

By rjbathgate - December 21, 2008

Hi,

Just a quick question, what is the format for wildcards in a PHP IF?

For example I have
$submitted = strtolower($_GET['submitted']);
$answer = 'abc';
<?php if ($answer == ($submitted) ): ?>

So this is defining the variable 'submitted' from the url that is passed.
And defining the variable 'answer' as 'abc'

This works fine.

But I want the IF to work where answer IS LIKE 'submitted'

I have tried all variations using LIKE, % and * but nothing works. For example, this doesn't work...
<?php if ($answer LIKE (%$submitted%) ): ?>

But then I realised that LIKE and % is SQL, not php! And i've tried googling php IF wildcards, but to no avail, which suggests that it's not actually that simple!

Any ideas would be most apprecaited,

Cheers, and merry christmas
Rob

Re: [rjbathgate] PHP IF with wildcard

By Dave - December 22, 2008

Hi Rob,

Yes, it's totally different in PHP then in MySQL. There's a list of string functions here: http://ca.php.net/manual/en/ref.strings.php

And much more advanced pattern matching functions called "Regular Expressions" that you can learn about that let you do this kind of thing (google for details).

But to keep it simple for now I'd just use this function: http://www.php.net/stripos

Try this:

<?php if (stripos("abc", $_GET['submitted']) !== false): ?>
Found submitted value in "abc" string.
<?php endif ?>

Basically it looks for the second value in the first value. If it find it it returns the offset (0, 1, 2, etc) or false if no match. Hope that helps, let me know if you need more details.
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com