Question

Supposing I have an array ("things and stuff", "the stuff"); that I am iterating through to compare each element to each element of another array – assume the second array is ("stuff the blah", "stuff and things to do");

And I want to preg_match anything that is generally relevant – I need it to match elements wherein the words are the same, even though their position has been changed – essentially I want "the stuff" to match "stuff the..." in this case.

What’s the best way to go about this?

Answer 1

You can simply split string of your first array to be compared with all string values on second array, here the example:

$array1 = array("things and stuff", "the stuff");
$array2 = array("stuff the blah", "stuff and things to do");

$result = array();

foreach($array1 as $val1){

    $words1 = explode(" ", $val1);

    $result[$val1] = 'not found';

    foreach($array2 as $val2){

        $words2 = explode(" ", $val2);
        $intersect = array_intersect($words1, $words2);
        $diff = array_diff($words1, $intersect);

        if(empty($diff))
            $result[$val1] = 'found';
    }
}

var_dump($result);

References:

• explode
• array_ intersect
• array_ diff