MATLAB: How to search through a character array with another character that has optional words

Question

Hello,

I have a character array and I want to search through it using another character. More specifically, for this example, the character array that will be the search term are the words 'banana apple'. What I want to do now is search through a text document for those two words but it does not have to come consecutively; it can be 'banana' OR 'apple'. I have done the following:

 char = 'banana apple'
 index1 = regexpi(textdocument,char,'match')

This obviously looks for the presence of 'banana apple' exactly the way it is so I split the search term using

 newchar = split(char)

which gives me a 2×1 string array but unfortunately, it still is incorrect. It should search for 'banana' OR 'apple' and give me a large amount of indexes but it only gives me a few. Sometimes adding in words that shouldn't give me any results, such as 'MATLAB', somehow has results.

Is there a better way of doing this? If I can include an OR operator somehow within my search expression that would be great!

Answer 1

str = 'banana apple';
rgx = strrep(str,' ','|');
regexpi(...,rgx,'match')

Or if there might be newlines, tabs, or multiple spaces:

rgx = regexprep(str,'\W+','|')