How to find a whole word in a string in PHP without accidental matches?

Question

Parsing an array of string commands, I need to know if a string contains a specific keyword.

Sounds simple I know, but the problem comes when the command keyword may

Answer 1

You can use a regular expression to easily achive the goal.

Example #2 from the documentation of preg_match:

/* The \b in the pattern indicates a word boundary, so only the distinct
 * word "web" is matched, and not a word partial like "webbing" or "cobweb" */
 if (preg_match("/\bweb\b/i", "PHP is the web scripting language of choice.")) {
     echo "A match was found.";
 } else {
     echo "A match was not found.";
 }

Note that the above example uses the i modifier, which makes the search for "web" case insensitive.