How to match any word in a String with Regex in PHP

Question

I have these strings. I want a regular expression to match them and return true when I pass them to preg_match function.

do you want to eat katak at my home         


        

Answer 1

Use a quantifier:

$pattern = "/do you want to eat ([a-z0-9]*) at my hometown\?/i";
//                                here __^

and escape the ? ==> \?

Answer 2

$text = "do you want to eat meatball at my hometown?";
$pattern = "/(\w+)(?=\sat)/";
if (preg_match($pattern, $text))

(\w+) matches one or more word characters.

(?=\sat) is a positive lookahead that matches one whitespace \s and the letters at.

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