Question

I am trying to use preg_match to find a certain word in a string of text.

$pattern = "/" . $myword . "/i";

This pattern will find the word “car” inside “cartoon”…
I need just matches where the certain word appears.

P.S The word may be anywhere inside the text.
Thanks

Answer 1

Wrap your regex with word-boundaries:

$pattern = "/\b" . $myword . "\b/i";

or, if your $myword may contain regex-meta-chars, do:

$pattern = "/\b" . preg_quote($myword) . "\b/i";