Searching the string

I want to search a string for occurrence of several characters and word in one syntax; for example I want to look for characters "http://" "<a" "<div>" "</" "htm" and other tags in the string. All in one syntax. Can anyone help me?

using the regular expression below with preg_match() should work fine:

Code:

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@(<(a|div|/)|http://|htm)@i

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for example:

PHP Code:

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$pattern = '@(<(a|div|/)|http://|htm)@i';
$str = "http://davidmiles.ca";

if(preg_match($pattern, $str)){
  echo "the string was found";
}else{
  echo "the string was not found";
} 


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if you would like an explanation of the regular expression, please don't hesitate to ask.

Thank you "David", I will take your offer. I have read a few tutorials but never really able to understand regular expressions.