Question

I am trying to make sense of handling regular expression with php. So far my code is:
PHP code:

$string = "This is a 1 2 3 test.";

$pattern  = '/^[a-zA-Z0-9\. ]$/';
$match = preg_match($pattern, $string);

echo "string: " . $string . " regex response: " , $match; 

Why is $match always returning 0 when I think it should be returning a 1?

Answer 1

[a-zA-Z0-9\. ] means one character which is alphanumeric or “.” or ” “. You will want to repeat this pattern:

$pattern  = '/^[a-zA-Z0-9. ]+$/';
                            ^
                      "one or more"

Note: you don’t need to escape . inside a character group.