to fetch case insensitive word from a regular expression - php

Question

Suppose, I am having a string like
$res = "there are many restaurants in the city. Restaurants like xyz,abc. one restaurant like.....";
In the above example, We can find restaurant in 3 places. I need the count to be 3.
$pattern = '/Restaurant/';
preg_match($pattern, substr($res,10), $matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
print_r($matches);
One more problem
Which is related to the above question. i.e., I am having text like Food & Drinks. I need to match this word with food or drinks or seafood... etc. can anyone please help me in getting this. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can use a regex like this:
$pattern = '/restaurants?/i';
There are two changes that I made to your original regex:
Adding the i modifier - this is the case insensitive flag.
Adding s? to the end of the search string. This makes the last s character optional. It matches zero or one occurances of s.
Note that because we are using the case insensitive flag, this regex will also match things like :
ResTaurants
rEstaurantS
RESTauRANTS

Answer 2

The i modifier is used for case-insensitive matching. The ? quantifier makes the preceding token optional matching in this case the preceding s either zero or one time.
You are using preg_match() wanting to get all matches, you need preg_match_all()
$pattern = '/restaurants?/i';
preg_match_all($pattern, substr($res,10), $matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
print_r($matches[0]);
See working demo

Answer 3

I suggest looking at a regex guide - this is a very simple request.
| in regex means or and ? means 0 or 1 of previous char or group, so the following pattern should work for your specification:
$pattern = '/[Rr]estaurants?/

Answer 4

As a solution to your problem please try executing following code snippet
$url = "http://www.examplesite.com/";
$curl = new Curl();
$res = $curl->get($url);
$pattern = '/Restaurant(s)*/i';
preg_match($pattern, substr($res,10), $matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
print_r($matches);