PHP variable which can mean any value

Hello

i am not sure if there is something like this in PHP

what i want is a variable which can mean any variable
as $anything=you
and may be =playingfootball
or even =ieieieieidd

example:

if (eregi('AAAA'.$anything.'BBBB', $text))
{

do something here;

}

as $anything may equal to anything (132,hello,abc123,...etc) or even equals nothing

and the if statement returns true if the
$text="AAAABBBB"
or $text="AAAA123BBBB"
or $text="AAAAhelloBBBB"
..etc

i hope you understood what i mean

i hope that someone can give me an answer

Thanks

Cheers
Adel

 

Err... I'll take a wild guess and point you to the preg_match() manual page, which I think is what you want.

After re-reading a couple of times, give this a try:

if (preg_match('~AAAA.*BBBB~s', $text))
{
    // Do something
}

PHP:

 

or you could just try this :

$anything=array("you","me","someThing");
foreach($anything as $value)
if (eregi('AAAA'.$value.'BBBB', $text)){

// do something

}

PHP:

 

nico_swd is the most right, but to keep you in the EREGI function, here's my 2 cents:

if (eregi('AAAA(.*)BBBB', $text))
{

//do something here;

}

PHP:

If you want to make sure they actually have something between the As and Bs, change the * to +

* means zero or more
+ means one or more
? means one or none
. means ANY character

Don't worry about the parenthesis. It will not require them to have it in the string. It is placing a sub-match string inside the other string (it makes it look cleaner, to me anyways).

 

thanks all for helping +rep added

Cheers