preg_match issue

[martynball]

Hey, i'm try to search a list of words for matches using afew characters.

So for example I will have the word "phone" in this list, and then I have the characters "hpnoe" which will spell phone in the correct order.

But it seams my expression "[hpnoe]" is not matching "phone" unless the letters are in the correct order. Anyone know why?

PHP Code:

$matches = array();
foreach ($pos_words as $word) {
    preg_match('['.$chars.']', $word, $matches);
} 


[gvre]

If you want to check if chars in any order completely match word, try the following.

PHP Code:

<?php
$word = preg_split('##', 'phone');
sort($word);
$word = implode('', $word);

$chars = preg_split('##', 'hpnoe');
sort($chars);
$chars = implode('', $chars);

if ($word === $chars)
        echo "match";
else
        echo "not match";

[martynball]

The phone word was just an example, I can see what you have done there but in reality I won't know what the word is, as basically I query about 14 characters "a-z" against a dictionary, and define the length of the word.

Then I need it to return possible words that can be made with the 14 characters.

[gvre]

Try this

PHP Code:

<?php
$words = array('phone', 'pheon', 'test', 'whatever'); // words from db
$chars = 'hpnoe'; // random chars

$chars = preg_split('##', $chars);
sort($chars);
$chars = implode('', $chars);

$matches = array();
foreach($words as $word)
{
        $origWord = $word;

        $word = preg_split('##', $word);
        sort($word);
        $word = implode('', $word);
        if ($word === $chars)
                $matches[] = $origWord;
}

if (isset($matches[0]))
{
        print_r($matches);
}