filter values from an array similar to SQL LIKE '%search%' using PHP

Question

I created an autocomplete field using JQueryUI and I've stored my data in a flat doc. I can read the values into an array... but I would like to be able to return the alphabetic matches based on the user input. So if the array contains [orange,blue,green,red,pink,brown,black] and the user types bl then I only return [blue,black].

Looking at array_diff() but without complete matches on the entire value of the array, I'm not sure how to use it... maybe a regular expression thrown in? My two weakest skills array manipulation and regex Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

You don't need to use array_filter and a custom / lambda function, preg_grep does the trick:

$input = preg_quote('bl', '~'); // don't forget to quote input string! $data = array('orange', 'blue', 'green', 'red', 'pink', 'brown', 'black');  $result = preg_grep('~' . $input . '~', $data); 

Answer 2

array_filter(), with a callback filtering function based on stripos(), should do the trick.

For example, if the input is stored in $input, and your array in $data :

$input = 'bl'; $data = array('orange', 'blue', 'green', 'red', 'pink', 'brown', 'black'); 

Filtering to keep only the words that contain $input (no matter where in the string) could be done this way :

$result = array_filter($data, function ($item) use ($input) {     if (stripos($item, $input) !== false) {         return true;     }     return false; });  var_dump($result); 

And, here, you'd get :

array   1 => string 'blue' (length=4)   6 => string 'black' (length=5) 

Changing the filtering callback, you can :

• Test if the string begins with the input -- testing if the value returned by stripos() is === 0
• Use a case-sensitive matching function, like strpos()