A shorter way to run a match on the array's keys rather than the values:
<?php
function preg_grep_keys($pattern, $input, $flags = 0) {
return array_intersect_key($input, array_flip(preg_grep($pattern, array_keys($input), $flags)));
}
?>
(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)
preg_grep — Return array entries that match the pattern
Returns the array consisting of the elements of the
array array that match the given
pattern.
patternThe pattern to search for, as a string.
arrayThe input array.
flags
If set to PREG_GREP_INVERT, this function returns
the elements of the input array that do not match
the given pattern.
Returns an array indexed using the keys from the
array array, or false on failure.
If the regex pattern passed does not compile to a valid regex, an E_WARNING is emitted.
Example #1 preg_grep() example
<?php
// return all array elements
// containing floating point numbers
$fl_array = preg_grep("/^(\d+)?\.\d+$/", $array);
?>
A shorter way to run a match on the array's keys rather than the values:
<?php
function preg_grep_keys($pattern, $input, $flags = 0) {
return array_intersect_key($input, array_flip(preg_grep($pattern, array_keys($input), $flags)));
}
?>Run a match on the array's keys rather than the values:
<?php
function preg_grep_keys( $pattern, $input, $flags = 0 )
{
$keys = preg_grep( $pattern, array_keys( $input ), $flags );
$vals = array();
foreach ( $keys as $key )
{
$vals[$key] = $input[$key];
}
return $vals;
}
?>This may be obvious to most experienced developers,but just in case its not,when using preg_grep to check for whitelisted items ,one must be very careful to explicitly define the regex boundaries or it will fail
<?php
$whitelist = ["home","dashboard","profile","group"];
$possibleUserInputs = ["homd","hom","ashboard","settings","group"];
foreach($possibleUserInputs as $input)
{
if(preg_grep("/$input/i",$whitelist)
{
echo $input." whitelisted";
}else{
echo $input." flawed";
}
}
?>
This results in:
homd flawed
hom whitelisted
ashboard whitelisted
settings flawed
group whitelisted
I think this is because if boundaries are not explicitly defined,preg_grep looks for any instance of the substring in the whole array and returns true if found.This is not what we want,so boundaries must be defined.
<?php
foreach($possibleUserInputs as $input)
{
if(preg_grep("/^$input$/i",$whitelist)
{
echo $input." whitelisted";
}else{
echo $input." flawed";
}
}
?>
this results in:
homd flawed
hom flawed
ashboard flawed
settings flawed
group whitelisted
in_array() will also give the latter results but will require few tweaks if say,the search is to be case insensitive,which is always the case 70% of the time