matching the regular expression with the whole string

Question

im kinda strumped in a situation where i need to match a whole string with a regular expression rather than finding if the pattern exists in the string.

suppose if i have a regular expression

/\\^^\\w+\\$^/

what i want is that the code will run through various strings , compare the strings with the regular expression and perform some task if the strings start and end with a ^.

Examples

^hello world^ is a match

my ^hello world^ should not be a match

the php function preg_match matches both of the results

any clues ???

Answer 1

Anchor the ends.

/^...$/

Answer 2

Here is a way to do the job:

$strs = array('^hello world^', 'my ^hello world^');
foreach($strs as $str) {
    echo $str, preg_match('/^\^.*\^$/', $str) ? "\tmatch\n" : "\tdoesn't match\n";
}

Output:

^hello world^   match
my ^hello world^        doesn't match