Get all pattern Word fom a Text

Question

If I have a text, how can I get all the strings with a certain pattern from the text? For example I want all the strings with this patters:

The word CER followed by any number followed by one of this characters ;, ,, . or space .

For exemple from the text bellow I wold like to have in an array the following results : CER123 , CER23 , CER01 , CER24

Lorem CER123 ipsum dolor sit amet, quod copiosae CER23,CER01;CER24 insolens et usu, vis CER34ERD ut saperet civibus accommodare.

I've tried this:

preg_match_all("/CER[0-9*]?/",$content,$m);

but it returns : CER1 , CER2 , CER0 , CER2 and CER3

Answer 1

Use +, add a capturing group and create a character class for the characters you require after the value you need to get:

preg_match_all('/(CER[0-9]+)[;,.\s]/',$content,$m);
                 ^        ^^^^^^^^^

See the regex demo

Pattern explanation:

• (CER[0-9]+) - Group 1 capturing the parts of text you need:
  • CER - a sequence of literal characters CER (NOTE: If you need whole word CER only, after a non-word char or at the start of the string, add word boundaries: \bCER\b)
  • [0-9]+ (=\d+) - 1 or more digits
• [;,.\s] - any char inside the character class: ;, ,, . or \s (whitespace - replace with a space if you only mean a regular space).

PHP demo:

$re= '/(CER[0-9]+)[;,.\s]/';
$content = "Lorem CER123 ipsum dolor sit amet, quod copiosae CER23,CER01;CER24 insolens et usu, vis CER34ERD ut saperet civibus accommodare."; 
preg_match_all($re, $content, $m);
print_r($m[1]);