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copied!<p>Of course it's possible with regex! You're not asking to match nested parentheses! :P</p> <p>But yes, this is the kind of thing regular expressions were built for. An example:</p> <pre><code>/\S*[^\w\s]+\S*/ </code></pre> <p>This will match all of the following:</p> <pre><code>@ss as$ a$s @$s a$$ @s$ @$$ </code></pre> <p>It will <em>not</em> match this:</p> <pre><code>ass </code></pre> <p>Which I believe is what you want. How it works:</p> <p><code>\S*</code> matches 0 or more non-space characters. <code>[^\w\s]+</code> matches only the symbols (it will match anything that isn't a word or a space), and matches 1 or more of them (so a symbol character is required.) Then the <code>\S*</code> again matches 0 or more non-space characters (symbols and letters).</p> <p>If I may be allowed to suggest a better strategy, in Perl you can store a regex in a variable. I don't know if you can do this in PHP, but if you can, you can construct a list of variables like such:</p> <pre><code>$a = /[aA@]/ # regex that matches all a-like symbols $b = /[bB]/ $c = /[cC(]/ # etc... </code></pre> <p>Or:</p> <pre><code>$regex = array( 'a' => /[aA@]/, 'b' => /[bB]/, 'c' => /[cC(]/, ... ); </code></pre> <p>So that way, you can match "friend" in all its permutations with:</p> <pre><code>/$f$r$i$e$n$d/ </code></pre> <p>Or:</p> <pre><code>/$regex['f']$regex['r']$regex['i']$regex['e']$regex['n']$regex['d']/ </code></pre> <p>Granted, the second one looks unnecessarily verbose, but that's PHP for you. I think the second one is probably the best solution, since it stores them all in a hash, rather than all as separate variables, but I admit that the regex it produces is a bit ugly.</p>

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