$re = '/(?:(?:\,[,^.]{0,}|^)(foobar)[,^.]{0,})/';
$str = 'foobar,foobar123,abc,foo,bar,foObar,,,foobar,f,dfg,$foobar£,foobar';
preg_match_all($re, $str, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER, 0);
// Print the entire match result
var_dump($matches);
Please keep in mind that these code samples are automatically generated and are not guaranteed to work. If you find any syntax errors, feel free to submit a bug report. For a full regex reference for PHP, please visit: http://php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php