Question

Very simple, I need to match the # symbol using a regex. I’m working on a hashtag detector.

I’ve tried searching in google and in stack overflow. One related post is here, but since he wanted to remove the # symbol from the string he didn’t use regex.

I’ve tried the regexes /\b\#\w\w+/, and /\b#\w\w+/ and they don’t work and if I remove the #, it detects the word.

Answer 1

You don’t need to escape it (it’s probably the \b that’s throwing it off):

if (preg_match('/^\w+#(\w+)/', 'abc#def', $matches)) {
    print_r($matches);
}

/* output of $matches:
Array
(
    [0] => abc#def
    [1] => def
)
*/