php - Regex to match a word, even is there are spaces between letters

Question

I'd like to have a regex to match a word, even if there are spaces between the characters. When I want to match the word test, it should match the following:

test t est t e s t

And so on, but it should not match things like this:

tste te ts s tet

I have this regex: (t[s]*e[s]*s[s]*t[s]*) But I don't believe that this one is very efficient.

Answer 1

Why not remove all horizontal spaces from input and then match regex:

$input = 't e s t';
$regex = '/test/i';

preg_match($regex, preg_replace('/h+/', '', $input), $m);