note 42312 rejected from function.ereg by tomsommer

Note Submitter: crimson _ icegirl at yahoo dot com ---- Have been looking for a way to use variables instead of directly having to specify the characters or string to be checked for . what i mean is: if $a ='a'; $b ='b'; then ereg(($a$b),$some_string,reg[]) should look for 'a' or 'b' in $some_string. is it possible? i need it to be able to use words retrieved from the database in the patterns. I know '$' signifies the end of the string. i'm hoping mebbe there's another way of referencing the variable inside he pattern string .