Question

I’m new to regular expressions and am trying to find a string using preg_match, here’s my code:

$artist = $row['ARTIST'];
$bool = preg_match("/$artist/", $description, $match);

My error is:

Unknown modifier 'C' in ...

If anyone could tell me what I’m doing wrong I’d appreciate it, thanks.

Answer 1

You have to escape possible special characters in your variable:

$bool = preg_match('/' . preg_quote($artist, '/') . '/', $description, $match);

preg_quote() in the PHP Manual:

preg_quote() takes str and puts a backslash in front of every
character that is part of the regular expression syntax. This is
useful if you have a run-time string that you need to match in some
text and the string may contain special regex characters.

Hint: try echoing your $artist variable and you should see which character is causing the problem