Regular expression to match all search terms

Question

I need a regular expression that will match on all terms in a set of search terms. If the user types \"bat sun\" then I need to match any text entries that have words starting w

Answer 1

Depending on your definition of "word", you might be able to get away with using \b to match the beginning of a word.

As for checking for two results, it's much easier to do using two matches.

/\bsun/i && /\bbat/i          # Engines without implicit anchoring
/.*\bsun.*/i && /.*\bbat.*/i  # Engines with implicit anchoring

It can be done if your regex engine supports zero-width lookaheads.

/^(?=.*\bsun)(?=.*\bbat)/si   # Engines without implicit anchoring
/^(?=.*\bsun).*\bbat/si       # Engines without implicit anchoring
/(?=.*\bsun)(?=.*\bbat).*/si  # Engines with implicit anchoring