Question

I have a PHP array of about 20,000 names, I need to filter through it and remove any name that has the word job, freelance, or project in the name.

Below is what I have started so far, it will cycle through the array and add the cleaned item to build a new clean array. I need help matching the “bad” words though. Please help if you can

$data1 = array('Phillyfreelance' , 'PhillyWebJobs', 'web2project', 'cleanname');

// freelance
// job
// project

$cleanArray = array();
foreach ($data1 as $name) {
    # if a term is matched, we remove it from our array
    if(preg_match('~\b(freelance|job|project)\b~i',$name)){
        echo 'word removed';

    }else{
        $cleanArray[] = $name;
    }

}

Right now it matches a word so if “freelance” is a name in the array it removes that item but if it is something like ImaFreelaner then it does not, I need to remove anything that has the matching words in it at all

Answer 1

A regular expression is not really necessary here — it’d likely be faster to use a few stripos calls. (Performance matters on this level because the search occurs for each of the 20,000 names.)

With array_filter, which only keeps elements in the array for which the callback returns true:

$data1 = array_filter($data1, function($el) {
        return stripos($el, 'job') === FALSE
            && stripos($el, 'freelance') === FALSE
            && stripos($el, 'project') === FALSE;
});

---

Here’s a more extensible / maintainable version, where the list of bad words can be loaded from an array rather than having to be explicitly denoted in the code:

$data1 = array_filter($data1, function($el) {
        $bad_words = array('job', 'freelance', 'project');
        $word_okay = true;

        foreach ( $bad_words as $bad_word ) {
            if ( stripos($el, $bad_word) !== FALSE ) {
                $word_okay = false;
                break;
            }
        }

        return $word_okay;
});