How To Use Different Regex Patterns In Preg_match_all [duplicate]

• Your patterns probably don't work all that well (they look cobbled together)
• That being said, the way to say OR in regex is the alternation operator |
• Therefore you could join them with $regex = "~\S+[\.]?\s?\S*|((\w+)?)~";

... but in my view this pattern needs a beauty job. :)

1. \S+[\.]?\s?\S* can be tidied up as \S+\.?\s?\S*, but the \S+ will eat up the \. so you probably need a lazy quantifier: \S+?\.?\s?\S*... But this is just some solid chars + an optional dot + one optional space + optional solid chars... So the period in the middle can go, as \S already specified it. We end up with \S+\s?\S*
2. ((\w+)?) is just \w*, unless you need a capture group.
3. But \S+\s?\S* is able to match everything \w* matches, except for the empty string, so you can reduce this to \S+\s?\S*

Finally

Therefore, you would end up with something like:

$regex = "~\S+\s?\S*~";
$count = preg_match_all($regex,$string,$matches);

If you do want this to also be able to match the empty string, as ((\w+)?) did, then make the whole thing optional:

$regex = "~(?:\S+\s?\S*)?~";

Just combine the regexes like below using an logical OR(|) operator,

$regex = "~/(?:((\w+)?)|\S+[\.]?\s?\S*)/~"

(?:) represents a non-capturing group.

It would print the strings which are matched by first or second regex.