title: Matching multicharacter strings without saving the match in PHP
body: <p>In PHP using preg_match I want to match one of many multicharacter strings (e.g. "date", "after" and "latest") (followed by some more match, which are saved e.g. ([0-9]+) and the like ).</p>
  
  <p>If it were a single characters (e.g. b, f and g) the regexp would just be:</p>
  
  <pre><code> /[bfg] rest of the regex(p)?/
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If I were to match (and save) the match of multicharacter strings it would be something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code> /(date|after|latest) rest of the regex(p)?/
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now can I match "date", "after" or "latest" without saving whichever one was matched in the resulting array?</p>