a form pass a string with wildcard characters (*) to the php page, I need to retrive all the matching words in a text file already on the server.
I think regex is a good way.
here a little piece of code:
$w= 'h**e'; // example of word
$matches=array();
$filename = 'words.txt'; //txt file
$words= file_get_contents ( $filename); //read file
$w=str_replace ("*", '\w',$w); //replace * with \w
preg_match_all('/'.$w.'/', $words, $matches); // get all matching string
var_dump($matches[0]); //print var
I replace wildcar char * with \w, this way I can find many occurences, for example i found 'hope' and 'hype', but also 'hopeless'. I need only the words with the correct length.
I'm sure my regex is incomplete, but I can't find the right one. For example '/^h\w\we$/' didn't work.
any help? thank you
