Need help with PHP wildcards or regular expressions

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prototype18
Forum Commoner
Posts: 25
Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 9:52 am

Need help with PHP wildcards or regular expressions

Post by prototype18 »

Okay, I have a problem. I need to display multilple output of a file with a similar file name

I.E.

file1: 6002010.pdf
file2: 6002010.mmddyyyy.pdf

Now the first part of the file stays the same, but there is a time stamp on modified versions of the file. But in my output I need to display all the files with the 6002010.

Could I use a wildcard such as 6002010* to get all the files to output on the screen? Or do I need to use a regular expression? GLOB maybe?
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Jonah Bron
DevNet Master
Posts: 2764
Joined: Thu Mar 15, 2007 6:28 pm
Location: Redding, California

Re: Need help with PHP wildcards or regular expressions

Post by Jonah Bron »

Yes, regular expression. Loop through all files, and check this expression with preg_match().

Code: Select all

/^6002010\..*\.pdf$/i
The ^ at the beginning says "This can't just be in the string, this match must start at the beginning.
The first backslash (\) escapes the first dot to indicate that it's a literal dot.
The next dot matches anything but whitespace.
The first * states that the dot can reoccur as many times as necessary.
Then there's another escaped dot (\.)
Then pdf
Then $ which requires that to be the end of the string.
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