Question

The pipe symbol | is used in Regular Expression as a sort of ‘either’ statement, far as I know. Either this, either that, or that, or that, etc…

However, I wish to check a string with a regular expression, for the presence of this symbol. I’ve tried escaping it, but that doesn’t seem to work.

How do I do this, especially if I’m already checking for a number of symbols to be present, like #, &, @, etc…

Answer 1

$ cat 1933190.php

<?php
    echo preg_match("/\|/", "This is not a pipe.") . "\n";
    echo preg_match("/\|/", "The | the | this is a |.") . "\n";
?>

Output:

$ php 1933190.php
0
1