PHP - Check if string contains illegal chars in string - php

Question

In JS you can do:
var chs = "[](){}";
var str = "hello[asd]}";
if (str.indexOf(chs) != -1) {
alert("The string can't contain the following characters: " + chs.split("").join(", "));
}
How can you do this in PHP (replacing alert with echo)?
I do not want to use a regex for the simplicity of what I think.
EDIT:
What I've tried:
<?php
$chs = /[\[\]\(\)\{\}]/;
$str = "hella[asd]}";
if (preg_match(chs, str)) {
echo ("The string can't contain the following characters: " . $chs);
}
?>
Which obviously doesn't work and idk how to do it without regex.

Answer 1

In php you should do this:
$string = "Sometring[inside]";
if(preg_match("/(?:\[|\]|\(|\)|\{|\})+/", $string) === FALSE)
{
echo "it does not contain.";
}
else
{
echo "it contains";
}
The regex says check to see any of the characters are inside the string. you can read more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
And about PHP preg_match() :
http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php
Update:
I have written an updated regex for this, which captures the letters inside:
$rule = "/(?:(?:\[([\s\da-zA-Z]+)\])|\{([\d\sa-zA-Z]+)\})|\(([\d\sa-zA-Z]+)\)+/"
$matches = array();
if(preg_match($rule, $string, $matches) === true)
{
echo "It contains: " . $matches[0];
}
It returnes something like this:
It contains: [inside]
I have changed the regex only which becomes:
$rule = "/(?:(?:(\[)(?:[\s\da-zA-Z]+)(\]))|(\{)(?:[\d\sa-zA-Z]+)(\}))|(\()(?:[\d\sa-zA-Z]+)(\))+/";
// it returns an array of occurred illegal characters
It now returns [] for this "I am [good]"

Answer 2

Why not you try str_replace.
<?php
$search = array('[',']','{','}','(',')');
$replace = array('');
$content = 'hella[asd]}';
echo str_replace($search, $replace, $content);
//Output => hellaasd
?>
Instead of regex we can use string replace for this case.

Answer 3

here is a simple solution without using regex:
$chs = array("[", "]", "(", ")", "{", "}");
$string = "hello[asd]}";
$err = array();
foreach($chs AS $key => $val)
{
if(strpos($string, $val) !== false) $err[]= $val;
}
if(count($err) > 0)
{
echo "The string can't contain the following characters: " . implode(", ", $err);
}