Regex question, maybe even easier

[equityPHP]

Here's the scenario. I want to check a string before inserting into the database.

What I am checking for is if the first 3 words of the string, match anything that's already in the database.

I am thinking that I can somehow you strpos but I'm not exactly sure how I would use it to make it work.

Someone with a little more knowledge clue me in on this one.

Thanks

[equityPHP]

Actually figured it out before I thought I would. Check this out.

$title = "Test Post"; // Sometimes one might use test post 2
$exploded = explode(' ', $title);
$needles = array($exploded[0], $exploded[1], $exploded[2]);
foreach ($needles as $needle) {
echo $needle;
}

This hasn't been applied with mysql, but I'm doing that now so I can move forward.

Btw, just incase is wondering why I needed to do this.. Is because I have RSS Importers that sometimes bring in multiple posts across several networks that were mirrored to those both.. and I don't need duplicate entries, even if it's from different sites.

[AppsGuy]

the way I would do it in VB.NET is that I would

MatchCollection mc = Regex.Match(inputString, "\b\w+\b")
If mc.Count >= 3 Then ....

mc(0).Value <--- word 1
mc(1).Value < ---- word 2
blah blah
....

inside the regex "\b" means a zero-width assertion that only matches on the WORD BOUNDARIES. Then we have at least one \w which means character inside the word (kind of not separator not punctuation char - smth like letters, digits or underscore) - \w+ means at least ONE or MORE. And then we have to put another "\b" so it does not stop in the middle of the word but rather goes on until the end of the word and consumes the whole word

And so it will return a collection on match objects and each Match.Value would contain one word.

If I am not mistaken, I think that PHP regex syntax is very similar, and there should be some methods that would return collection of matches, so this same approach could probably be ported to PHP.

Cheers,
Alex

[equityPHP]

I appreciate that. I'm sure that the regex functionality would be quicker, but this concept does the trick. Thanks for you input though. Love to learn.