note 44209 modified in function.preg-match by tularis

[Editor's note: When adding the i Pattern Modifier, you can also test on lowercase words. This means you won't need to have everything in sentence case/upper case at start] Testing for indefinite articles in the English Language. As I'm new to PHP and Regex, I decided to practice on something that would make my pages more sophisticated. When choosing from a drop-down menu of models of cars (e.g. Civic, CR-V, Accord etc.) I wanted to then be able to output: "Joe drives a Civic." or "Mary drives an Accord." The difference is the way "a" & "an" are used in English. This simple group of functions helped me grab the first letter, test if it was a vowel and then choose the proper article. <?php $first_letter = substr($value, 0, 1); // $value is the string you're grabbing the first letter from if(preg_match("/^A|E|I|O|U/", $first_letter)) { $article = "an"; } else { $article = "a"; } ?> --was-- Testing for indefinite articles in the English Language. As I'm new to PHP and Regex, I decided to practice on something that would make my pages more sophisticated. When choosing from a drop-down menu of models of cars (e.g. Civic, CR-V, Accord etc.) I wanted to then be able to output: "Joe drives a Civic." or "Mary drives an Accord." The difference is the way "a" & "an" are used in English. This simple group of functions helped me grab the first letter, test if it was a vowel and then choose the proper article. <?php $first_letter = substr($value, 0, 1); // $value is the string you're grabbing the first letter from if(preg_match("/^A|E|I|O|U/", $first_letter)) { $article = "an"; } else { $article = "a"; } ?> http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php