我如何使用正则表达式比较PHP字符串变量

Question

I would like to match (with regex) two strings ignoring the fact that one string may or may not have hyphens and/or single-quote chars (in fact just ignore all punctuation in both strings).

The problem is both strings are within PHP variables, not literals which i can do easily however, but not with variables - any ideas please ... is this even possible.

For example like a pattern modifier /i which specifies case-insensitive comparisons - is there a modifier to say ignore punctuation just compare alpha-numeric strings ??

Answer 1

if (preg_replace("/['\-]/", '', $str1) == preg_replace("/['\-]/", '', $str2) {
   ...equal...
}

basically: strip out ' and - from both strings, then compare the resulting stripped strings. If yout want case-insensitive, then do strtolower(preg_replace(....)) instead.