Question

I am trying to write a PHP code to query the following values.

Consider the expression NAME like \”$string\” where,

$string should match,
ABC,        //ABC can be followed by any characters (including special character)
ABCdef      //ABC can be followed by any characters (including special character)
ABC         //ABC followed by ONE Space
ABC df      //ABC SPACE followed by anything
def ABC sda //ABC being start of a word
ABC         //Just ABC

i.e. ABC should be the beginning of the string and should not be between any characters.

[edit]:
I tried something with wildcard characters like,

where $name like \"%$string%\" or like \"%string %\"

But it does not work.As I am new to PHP and regular expressions, can you help me in coming up with a solution.

Answer 1

Have you tried?

/(^|\s)ABC/

We check for “Start of string” (^) or Whitespace (\s) followed by ABC

Edit

Borrowing from @rodneyrehm, you might be looking for the SQL, not the PHP regex – in this case you need

... WHERE name RLIKE '(^|\\s)ABC'

or without a regex

... WHERE (name LIKE 'ABC%' OR name LIKE '% ABC%')