Simulating LIKE in PHP

Question

Is there a way to simulate the LIKE operator of SQL in PHP with the same syntax? (% and _ wildcards and a generic $escape escape chara

Answer 1

The other examples were a bit too complex for my taste (and painful to my clean code eyes), so I reimplemented the functionality in this simple method:

public function like($needle, $haystack, $delimiter = '~')
{
    // Escape meta-characters from the string so that they don't gain special significance in the regex
    $needle = preg_quote($needle, $delimiter);

    // Replace SQL wildcards with regex wildcards
    $needle = str_replace('%', '.*?', $needle);
    $needle = str_replace('_', '.', $needle);

    // Add delimiters, beginning + end of line and modifiers
    $needle = $delimiter . '^' . $needle . '$' . $delimiter . 'isu';

    // Matches are not useful in this case; we just need to know whether or not the needle was found.
    return (bool) preg_match($needle, $haystack);
}

Modifiers:

• i: Ignore casing.
• s: Make dot metacharacter match anything, including newlines.
• u: UTF-8 compatibility.