PCRE matching whole words in a string

Question

I\'m trying to run a regexp in php (preg_match_all) that matches certain whole words in a string, but problem is that it also matches words that contain only pa

Answer 1

If you really want to make sure you only get your words and not words that contain them, then you can use word boundary anchors:

/\b(testable|string)\b/

This will match only a word boundary followed by either testable or string and then another word boundary.

Answer 2

You don't want a character class with [], you just want to match the words:

/testable|string/