Question

Ok, here again.
I’ll promise to study deeply the regular expression soon 😛

Language: PhP

Problem:
Match if some badword exist inside a string and do something.
The word must be not included inside a “greater word”. I mean if i’ll search for “rob” (sorry Rob, i’m not thinking you’re a badword), the word “problem have to pass without check.

I’d googled around but found nothing good for me. So, I thought something like this:

If i match the word with after and before any character of the following:

• .
• ,
• ;
• :
• !
• ?
• (
• )
• +
• –
• [whitespace]

I can simulate a check against single word inside a string.

Finally the Questions:

1. There’s a better way to do it?
2. If not, which will be the correct regexp to consider [all_that_char]word[all_that_char]?

Thanks in advance to anyone would help!
Maybe this is a very stupid question but today is one of that day when move our neurons causes an incredible headache 😐

Answer 1

Look up \b (word boundary):

Matches at the position between a word
character (anything matched by \w) and
a non-word character (anything matched
by [^\w] or \W) as well as at the
start and/or end of the string if the
first and/or last characters in the
string are word characters.

(http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html)

So: \brob\b matches rob, but not problem.