Php search string (with wildcards)

Question

Is there a way to put a wildcard in a string? The reason why I am asking is because currently I have a function to search for a substring between two substrings (i.e grab the contents between "my" and "has fleas" in the sentence "my dog has fleas", resulting in "dog").

function get_string_between($string, $start, $end){ 
    $string = " ".$string; 
    $ini = strpos($string,$start); 
    if ($ini == 0) return ""; 
    $ini += strlen($start); 
    $len = strpos($string,$end,$ini) - $ini; 
    return substr($string,$ini,$len); 
} 

What I want to do is have it search with a wildcard in the string. So say I search between "%WILDCARD%" and "has fleas" in the sentence "My dog has fleas" - it would still output "dog".

I don't know if I explained it too well but hopefully someone will understand me :P. Thank you very much for reading!

Answer 1

This is one of the few cases where regular expressions are actually helpful. :)

if (preg_match('/my (\w+) has/', $str, $matches)) {
    echo $matches[1];
}

See the documentation for preg_match.

Answer 2

wildcard pattern could be converted to regex pattern like this

function wildcard_match($pattern, $subject) {
  $pattern = strtr($pattern, array(
    '*' => '.*?', // 0 or more (lazy) - asterisk (*)
    '?' => '.', // 1 character - question mark (?)
  ));
  return preg_match("/$pattern/", $subject);
}

if string contents special characters, e.g. \.+*?^$|{}/'#, they should be \-escaped

don't tested:

function wildcard_match($pattern, $subject) {
  // quotemeta function has most similar behavior,
  // it escapes \.+*?^$[](), but doesn't escape |{}/'#
  // we don't include * and ?
  $special_chars = "\.+^$[]()|{}/'#";
  $special_chars = str_split($special_chars);
  $escape = array();
  foreach ($special_chars as $char) $escape[$char] = "\\$char";
  $pattern = strtr($pattern, $escape);
  $pattern = strtr($pattern, array(
    '*' => '.*?', // 0 or more (lazy) - asterisk (*)
    '?' => '.', // 1 character - question mark (?)
  ));
  return preg_match("/$pattern/", $subject);
}