PCRE Functions

preg_filter — Perform a regular expression search and replace
preg_grep — Return array entries that match the pattern
preg_last_error — Returns the error code of the last PCRE regex execution
preg_last_error_msg — Returns the error message of the last PCRE regex execution
preg_match — Perform a regular expression match
preg_match_all — Perform a global regular expression match
preg_quote — Quote regular expression characters
preg_replace — Perform a regular expression search and replace
preg_replace_callback — Perform a regular expression search and replace using a callback
preg_replace_callback_array — Perform a regular expression search and replace using callbacks
preg_split — Split string by a regular expression

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User Contributed Notes 3 notes

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20 years ago

Something to bear in mind is that regex is actually a declarative programming language like prolog : your regex is a set of rules which the regex interpreter tries to match against a string.   During this matching, the interpreter will assume certain things, and continue assuming them until it comes up against a failure to match, which then causes it to backtrack.  Regex assumes "greedy matching" unless explicitly told not to, which can cause a lot of backtracking.  A general rule of thumb is that the more backtracking, the slower the matching process.

It is therefore vital, if you are trying to optimise your program to run quickly (and if you can't do without regex), to optimise your regexes to match quickly.

I recommend the use of a tool such as "The Regex Coach" to debug your regex strings.

http://weitz.de/files/regex-coach.exe (Windows installer) http://weitz.de/files/regex-coach.tgz (Linux tar archive)

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theking2 at king dot ma ¶

1 year ago

Writing regexp can be tedious and error prone. Test yours on https://regex101.com/ to make sure you haven't missed anything . It even colour codes example strings.

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stronk7 at moodle dot org ¶

17 years ago

One comment about 5.2.x and the pcre.backtrack_limit:

Note that this setting wasn't present under previous PHP releases and the behaviour (or limit) under those releases was, in practise,  higher so all these PCRE functions were able to "capture" longer strings.

With the arrival of the setting, defaulting to 100000 (less than 100K), you won't be able to match/capture strings over that size using, for example "ungreedy" modifiers.

So, in a lot of situations, you'll need to raise that (very small IMO) limit.

The worst part is that PHP simply won't match/capture those strings over pcre.backtrack_limit and will it be 100% silent about that (I think that throwing some NOTICE/WARNING if raised could help a lot to developers).

There is a lot of people suffering this changed behaviour from I've read on forums, bugs and so on).

Hope this note helps, ciao :-)

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PCRE Functions

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