I need to search through a file for occurrence of certain keywords that have some texts in between them but these texts aren't so important in the process and they are dynamically created so I won't know before hand what they are but I need to use the keywords to search through the file while ignoring any other text in between them.
I tried something like this
$string = "Jason loves cookies, he plays soccer and is a fun guy. He wakes up at 9:14AM everyday";
$match = "Jason\s+(.*)\s+soccer\s+(.*)everyday";
preg_match('/'.$match.'/', $string);
but it doesn't match.
Any pointer in the right direction on how to achieve this is greatly appreciated. If possible with an example will be even more appreciated.
EDIT
The above matches but here is a sample of what I am actually doing
I think you'll be fine with strpos.
It works like:
strpos($string, 'wordneeded');
But what you want as an output?
How to search within a given string so that every 3 (or more) character ordered coincidence is captured? I am using it for applying some conditional restrictions in an HTML search input...
My best try so far:
/[deleted]{3,}/g
I need "del", "ele", "let", "ete" or "ted" to be captured... But also "dele", "eted" or even the full "deleted". The preceding regex does the trick, but the problem now is the order of the characters, because it also captures strings like "ltd" or "eded", which are not in order with the word and should not.
Any help?
Thanks in advance.
Ok, I finally have found a solution that takes into account all of the restrictions. It was a matter of misunderstanding on my part. Sorry.
But thanks for all the replies and comments anyway:
Before posting the question, I started with the PHP solution as (I thought) #Tushar suggested in his first comment:
strpos('deleted', $inputString) !== false
But as it did not work as expected, I went for regex. The problem is what I really tested before the question was:
strpos($inputString, 'deleted') !== false
I exchanged the 'haystack' and the 'needle', resulting in unwanted results, so I ended up asking here in stackoverflow...
Summing up, the solution from #Tushar is absolutely correct. Credits to him.
Thanks mate.
I'm trying to scrap some information just for learning PHP and regex and I would like to extract it from an html.
The html text is an entire webpage but it has some patterns like somehtmltext_andtags_andeverything /ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=THE_ID_I_WANT andmore_text_and_tags.
I can isolate the pattern with TextEdit in Mac, but I want separate it!
how could I make it in PHP?
Thank you in advance!
Rafael.
Sorry, I was very unclear.
I want to separate only de ID, so if you see the image, the only text you would get is 100009799451329 . If the final result is the whole sentence (ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100009799451329) it doesn't matter, goes fine for me!
try this
$matchArr = NULL;
preg_match_all("/\/ajax\/hovercard\/user\.php\?id=(.*?)\&/", $yourStr, $matchArr);
print_r($matchArr);
You can use the following pattern to find the id:
\/ajax\/hovercard\/user.php\?id=(\d+)
See a demo.
Explanation:
\/ajax\/hovercard\/user.php\?id= will match /ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=
(\d+) captures a sequence of digits, in this case the user id.
Assume "xyza" is a bad word. I'm using following method to replace offensive words-
$text = str_replace("x***","(Offensive words detected & removed!)",$text);
This code will replace xyza into "(Offensive words detected & removed!)".
But problem is "Case" if someone type XYZA my code can't detect it. How to solve it?
No matter what you do, users will find ways to get around your filters. They will use unicode characters (аss, for example, uses a Cyrillic а and will not get captured by any of the regex solutions). They will use spaces, dollar signs, asterisks, whatever you haven't managed to catch yet.
If family-friendliness is essential to your application, have a person review the content before it goes live. Otherwise, add a flag feature so other people can flag offensive content. Better yet, use some sort of machine learning or Bayesian filter to automatically flag potentially offensive posts and have humans check them out manually. People read human languages better than computers.
The problem with whitelists/blacklists is—as other users have pointed out—your users will make it their priority to find ways around your filter for satisfaction rather than using your website for what it was intended for, whatever that may be.
One approach would be to use Google’s undocumented profanity API it created for its “What Do You Love?” website. If you get a response of true then just give the user a message saying their post couldn’t be submitted due to detected profanity.
You could approach this as follows:
<?php
if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {
$result = json_decode(file_get_contents(sprintf('http://www.wdyl.com/profanity?q=%s', urlencode($_POST['comments']))));
if ($result->response == true) {
// profanity detected
}
else {
// save comments to database as normal
}
}
Other answers and comments say that programming is not the best solution to this problem. I agree with them. Those answers should be moved to Moderators - Stack Exchange or Webmasters - Stack Exchange.
Since this is stackoverflow, my answer is going to be based on computer programming.
If you want to use str_replace, do something like this.
For the sake of this post, since some people are offended by actual cusswords, let's pretend that these are bad words:
'fug', 'schnitt', 'dam'.
$text = str_ireplace(" fug ","(Offensive words detected & removed!)",$text);
Notice, it's str_ireplace not str_replace. The i is for "case insensitive".
But that will erroneously match "fuggedaboudit," for example.
If you want to do a more reliable job, you need to use regex.
$bad_text = "Fug dis schnitt, because a schnitter never dam wins a fuggin schnitting darn";
$hit_words = array("fug","schnitt","dam"); // these words are 'hits' that we need to replace. hit words...
array_walk($hit_words, function(&$value, $key) { // this prepares the regex, requires PHP 5.3+ I think.
$value = '~\b' . preg_quote( $value ,'~') . '\b~i'; // \b means word boundary, like space, line-break, period, dash, and many others. Prevends "refudgee" from being matched when searching for "fudge"
});
/*print_r($bad_words);*/
$good_words = array("fudge","shoot","dang");
$good_text = preg_replace($hit_words,$good_words,$bad_text); // does all search/replace actions at once
echo '<br />' . $good_text . '<br />';
That will do all your search/replacements at once. The two arrays should contain the same number of elements, matching up searches and replace terms. It will not match parts of words, only whole words. And of course, determined cussers will find ways of getting their swearing onto your website. But it will stop lazy cussers.
I've decided to add some links to sites that obviously use programming to do a first run through removing profanity. I'll add more as I come across them. Other than yahoo:
1.) Dell.com - replace matching words with <profanity deleted>.
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/peripherals/f/3529/t/19502072.aspx
2.) Watson, the supercomputer, apparently developed a cursing problem. How do you tell the difference between cursing and slang? Apparently, it's so hard that the researchers just decided to purge it all. But they could have just used a list of curse words ( exact matching is a subset of regex, I would say) and forbidden their use. That's kind of how it works in real life, anyway.
Watson develops a profanity problem
3.) Content Compliance section of Gmail custom settings in Apps for Business:
Add expressions that describe the content you want to search for in each message
The "Expresssions" used can be of several types, including "Advanced content match", which, among other things, allows you to choose "Match type" options very similar to what you'd have in an excel filter: Starts with, Ends with, Contains, Not contains, Equals, Is Empty, all of which presumably use Regex. But wait, there's more: Matches regex, Not matches regex, Matches any word, Matches all words. So, the mighty Google implements regex filtering options for its business users. Why would it do that, when regex is supposedly so ineffective? Because it actually is effective enough. It is a simple, fast, programming solution that will only fail when people are hell-bent on circumventing it.
Besides that list, I wonder if anyone else has noticed the similarity between weeding out profanity and filtering out spam. Clearly, regex has uses in both arenas but nitpickers who learned by rote that "all regex is bad" will always downvote any answer to any question if regex is even mentioned.
Try googling "how spam filters work". You'll get results like this one that covers spam assassin:
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/cets/answers/spamblock-filter.html
Another example where I'm sure regex is used is when communicating via Amazon.com's Amazon Marketplace. You receive emails at your usual email address. So, naturally, when responding to a seller, your email program will include all kinds of sender information, like your email address, cc email addresses, and any you enter into the body. But Amazon.com strips these out "for your protection." Can I find a way around this regex? Probably, but it would take more trouble than it's worth and is therefore effective to a degree. They also keep the emails for 2 years, presumably so that a human can go over them in case of any fraud claims.
SpamAssassin also looks at the subject and body of the message for the same sort of things that a person notices when a message "looks like spam". It searches for strings like "viagra", "buy now", "lowest prices", "click here", etc. It also looks for flashy HTML such as large fonts, blinking text, bright colors, etc.
Regex is not mentioned, but I'm sure it's in use.
Use str_ireplace function that Case-insensitive version of str_replace()
$text = str_ireplace("flip","(Offensive words detected & removed!)", $text);
Use 'str_ireplace' to replace any case sensitive strings
Probable, this will help you
$text = 'contains offensive_word .... so on';
$array = array(
'offensive_word' => '****',
'offensive_word2' => '****',
'offensive_word3' => '****',
//.....
);
$text = str_ireplace(array_keys($array),array_values($array), $text);
echo $text;
You should use regex replacement and need to add the i flag to the end of your regex so it searches your text regardless of case. so..
$text = preg_replace("/xyza/i","(Offensive words detected & removed!)", $text);
str_ireplace can also be used if you don't need complex regex rules.
$text = str_ireplace("xyza","(Offensive words detected & removed!)", $text);
In fact, the latter is the preferred way as it's faster than regex manipulation. From PHP docs:
If you don't need fancy replacing rules, you should generally use this function instead of preg_replace() with the i modifier.
BUT, as the commenter pointed out, simple string/regex replacements can break your strings if the substring you're replacing appears as part of another non-offensive word. For this, you could either use word boundaries in your regexes or replace only those words that can't be part of other strings (e.g. the word xyza).
I've checked google for help on this subject but all the answers keep overlooking a fatal flaw in the replacement method.
Essentially I have a set of emoticons such as :) LocK :eek and so on and need to replace them with image tags. The problem I'm having is identifying that a particular emoticon is not part of a word and is alone on a line. For example on our site we allow 'quick links' which are not included in the smiley replacement which take the format go:forum, user:Username and so on. Pretty much all answers I've read don't allow for this possiblity and as such break these links (i.e. go<img src="image.gif" />orum). I've tried experimenting around with different ways to get around this to check for the start of the line, spaces/newline characters and so on but I've not had much luck.
Any help with this problem would be greatly appreciated. Oh also I'm using PHP 5 and the preg_% functions.
Thanks,
Rupert S.
Edit 18/04/2011:
Thanks for your help peeps :) Have created the final regex that I though I'd share with everyone, had a couple problems to do with special space chars including newline but it's now working like a dream the final regex is:
(?<=\s|\A|\n|\r|\t|\v|\<br \/\>|\<br\>)(:S)(?=\s|\Z|$|\n|\r|\t|\v|\<br \/\>|\<br\>)
To complete the comment into an answer: The simplest workaround would be to assert that the emoticons are always surrounded by whitespace.
(?<=\s|^)[<:-}]+(?=\s|$)
The \s covers normal spaces and line breaks. Just to be safe ^ and $ cover occurrences at the start or very end of the text subject. The assertions themselves do not match, so can be ignored in the replacement string/callback.
If you want to do all the replace in one single preg_replace, try this:
preg_replace('/(?<=^|\s)(:\)|:eek)(?=$|\s)/e'
,"'$1'==':)'?'<img src=\"smile.gif\"/>':('$1'==':eek'?'<img src=\"eek.gif\"/>':'$1')"
,$input);