Question

I’m trying to write a PHP script that finds all words in a list or a paragraph that have more than one capital letter – or a mix of at least 1 letter and 1 number. I Can find one capital letter, but 2 capital letters in a word is an issue.

Thank you

Answer 1

I hope I got your question right. These regular expressions matches all the words that have at least 2 capital letters in them or have at least 1 letter + 1 number (e.g. HEllo, HellO, Hello1, hello2, etc). It uses the space as separator so it might fail with punctuation, including commas, points and other things in the matches.

$text = 'Text';
preg_match_all('#(?<= )([^ ]*\p{Lu}[^ ]*\p{Lu}[^ ]*(?= )|[^ ]*\p{L}[^ ]*\p{N}[^ ]*|[^ ]*\p{N}[^ ]*\p{L}[^ ]*)(?= )#u', $text, $matches);
print_r($matches[0]);

(Explanation: it matches every word that is preceded and followed by a space (but don’t include them in the match), which has something that’s not a space repeated 0, 1 or more times, a capital letter, again a non-space repeated 0, 1 or more times, again a capital letter and again something that’s a non-space, or the same but in place of the capital letters you have a letter and a number, or a number and a letter)

In order to use this you need PHP > 5.1.0. The advantage is that it matches all the unicode characters that are considered letters or numbers, not just ASCII. If you don’t need this, or have a minor version of PHP, you can use the ASCII version:

$text = 'Text';
preg_match_all('#(?<= )([^ ]*[A-Z][^ ]*[A-Z][^ ]*(?= )|[^ ]*[A-Za-z][^ ]*[0-9][^ ]*|[^ ]*[0-9][^ ]*[A-Za-z][^ ]*)(?= )#', $text, $matches);
print_r($matches[0]);