Inserting a variable into a regexp pattern

[stormshield]

Hello,

preg_match_all('/thing/s',$text,$out,PREG_SET_ORDER);

This will find all occurences of "thing" in $text.

$thing = "thing";
preg_match_all('/' . $thing . '/s',$text,$out,PREG_SET_ORDER);

Why doesn't this work?

[stormshield]

I'm sorry I got it all wrong... the real cause of problems was the whitespace in front of the variable $thing (I passed the variable as a function argument). It works now :]

[d40sithui]

it's funny how many people are able to solve their own problems after posting on webmasterworld haha

[rocknbil]

There's actually a better way than that. What if you want to add modifiers, etc? Compile your entire regexp in the variable.

$thing = '/^\s*thing\s*$/im';
// Case-insensitive, treat as multiple lines, starts
// and ends with exactly "thing" and zero or more
// spaces before or after

preg_match_all("$thing",$text,$out,PREG_SET_ORDER);