PHP regex to match command with parameter - php

Question

I'm using this code inside PHP
case preg_match('/\/start( .*)?/', $text):
echo "got you";
break;
Using this regex all I need to do is catching following structure:
$text needs to be:
/start
or
/start xyz
Where "xyz" stands for random content. These are the two only formats which should be accepted by the regex. For some reason my regex seems to be not working as expected.

Answer 1

This should do the trick:
^\/start\s?[\S]*$
Here is an example in python DEMO:
import re
textlist = ["^/start xyz","/start","/start not to match"]
regex = "^/start\s?[\S]*$"
for text in textlist:
thematch = re.search(regex, text)
if thematch:
print ("match found")
else:
print ("no match sir!")
What it's doing: the line starts with /start and might have space, then there might be any amount of non space (including none) and then the line ends.
Hopefully that helps!
EDIT;
PHP version of this code.
$textlist = array("^/start xyz","/start","/start not to match");
$regex = "#^/start\s?[\S]*$#";
foreach($textlist as $text){
preg_match($regex, $text, $thematch);
if ($thematch){
print ("match found\n");
}else{
print ("no match sir!\n");
}
}
Demo here: https://3v4l.org/OFpnG