Regular Expressions

[Operandi]

I am currently working on a website that uses PHP to search a database for a part number. A part of the code uses regular expressions to make it easier to search the text file for the appropriate match. However, I am stuck using a method that seems overburdensome, but I cannot find a means of doing what I want with regular expressions by searching google and other places for php help. So here I am.

The code I am writing now, looks like this:

if ( ( $number == 1 ) && ( $size == "2inch" ) )
{
  function type1($type1)
  {
  return (eregi('2"', $type1));
  }
    if ( $type == "cht" )
    {
    function type2($type2)
    {
    return (eregi("cht", $type2));
        }
  }
    elseif ($type == "egt" )
    {
    function type2($type2)
    {
    return (eregi("egt", $type2));
        } 
    }
} 

This will continue for a very long time, egt and cht are types of gauges that are being searched for, and there are 4 different number sets, each with 5 different sizes, each containing about 15 or so gauge types. The work would be outrageous if I had to continue in this fashion.

What I want to be able to do instead, would be to directly input the type variable into the regular expression search, but when i try to apply this method it doesn't work.

The conceptual method looks like this:

if ( ( $number == 1 ) && ( $size == "2inch" ) )
{
  function type1($type1)
  {
  return (eregi('2"', $type1));
  }
  function type2($type2)
  {
  return (eregi($type, $type2));
  }
} 

Is there any way to implement a variable into a regular expression, like I want above. I have tried putting it inside of quotation marks and apostrophes as well.

Thanks for any help

[joeframbach]

here is what i gathered from that post:
$number, $size, and $type are passed from a form that the user submits.

can you please post an excerpt from your database? i assume you are looking through the lines of a text file for a line that matches.

can you please change "type1" and "type2" to names that are more descriptive? i do not understand what they are really doing.

[Operandi]

i fixed the problem, which was rather stupid

i was posting the functions outside of a loop that read the lines out of a text file one by one

i thought that the lines could be sent to the outside function and be fine, but apparently i was wrong.

once i put the code on the inside of the loop it worked correctly. if i kept it outside it gave me an eregi_empty error