How Can I Find All Occurrences of a String Pattern in PHP?

Finding Multiple String Occurrences with PHP's preg_match

In PHP, the preg_match function can be utilized to search for specific text patterns within strings. However, to locate multiple instances of the same pattern, a slightly different approach is required.

The solution lies in employing the preg_match_all() function instead of preg_match. This advanced function returns an array containing all the matching instances found within the input string, enabling us to determine their count.

Consider the following example:

$string = "/brown fox jumped [0-9]/";
$paragraph = "The brown fox jumped 1 time over the fence. The green fox did not. Then the brown fox jumped 2 times over the fence";

if (preg_match_all($string, $paragraph, $matches)) {
echo count($matches[0]) . " matches found";
} else {
echo "match NOT found";
}

In this example, the preg_match_all() function is utilized to search for multiple occurrences of the pattern "/brown fox jumped [0-9]/" within the given paragraph. The function will return an array named $matches, which contains all the found instances. By counting the number of elements in $matches[0], we can determine the number of matches.

Executing this code will output:

2 matches found

This demonstrates that the pattern "/brown fox jumped [0-9]/" appears twice within the paragraph.

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