Question

I give an example to easily describe the problem.

Input text:
Wayne Rooney is an English footballer who plays as a striker for Manchester United. Rooney became the youngest player to play for England when he earned his first cap in a friendly against Australia. Theo Walcott broke Rooney’s appearance record by 36 days in May 2006.

Input keyword: wayne rooney

Expected output (keyword count): 3 (wayne rooney, rooney, rooney’s)

So, it doesn’t only count “wayne rooney”, but also other similar words.

I have searching over SO, I got this regex:

$keyword_count = preg_match_all("/(\w*(?:wayne|rooney)\w*)/i", $source, $res);

But it gives me 4 as the output. It counts “wayne rooney” as two different keywords.

Could anyone help me to construct the correct formula?
Is Regex really the most efficient solution for this? I have a high volume of text to search. Any other solution, for example Text Mining library for PHP?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Try this regex:

(?i)(\b(?:wayne(?:'s)?\s*)?rooney(?:'s)?\b)

If you have limited count of regular rules to parse string, regex is appropriate to solve your problem. In general case you should use other methods (may be several regex).