How can wildcard characters be used effectively in PHP to search for a word in an array?

Wildcard characters can be used effectively in PHP to search for a word in an array by using the array_filter() function along with a custom callback function. The callback function can utilize the preg_match() function with a regular expression pattern that includes wildcard characters to match the search term against each element in the array. This allows for flexible and dynamic searching within the array based on the specified pattern.

// Array of words to search through
$words = ["apple", "banana", "cherry", "date"];

// Search term with wildcard character
$searchTerm = "a*e";

// Custom callback function to filter array based on search term
$searchResults = array_filter($words, function($word) use ($searchTerm) {
    return preg_match("/^" . str_replace("*", ".*", $searchTerm) . "$/", $word);
});

// Output the search results
print_r($searchResults);