title: Smarty Regular Expression Match
body: <p>I Have a smarty variable, I want to know if it matches some string like</p>
  
  <pre><code>"&lt;whatever&gt;_thestring_&lt;whatever&gt;" 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>where <code>&lt;whatever&gt;</code> represents any sequence of characters (or no characters).</p>
  
  <p>Is there some way to test against something like <code>*_thestring_*</code>?</p>