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# LXXXVI. Regular Expression Functions (POSIX Extended)

> Note: PHP also supports regular expressions using a Perl-compatible syntax using the PCRE functions. Those functions support non-greedy matching, assertions, conditional subpatterns, and a number of other features not supported by the POSIX-extended regular expression syntax.

Warning
These regular expression functions are not binary-safe. The PCRE functions are.

Regular expressions are used for complex string manipulation in PHP. The functions that support regular expressions are:

- ereg()

- ereg_replace()

- eregi()

- eregi_replace()

- split()

- spliti()

These functions all take a regular expression string as their first argument. PHP uses the POSIX extended regular expressions as defined by POSIX 1003.2. For a full description of POSIX regular expressions see the regex man pages included in the regex directory in the PHP distribution. It's in manpage format, so you'll want to do something along the lines of man /usr/local/src/regex/regex.7 in order to read it.

Example 1. Regular Expression Examples
    ereg ("abc", $string);
    /* Returns true if"abc"
       is found anywhere in $string. */

    ereg ("^abc", $string);
    /* Returns true if "abc";
       is found at the beginning of $string. */

    ereg ("abc$", $string);
    /* Returns true if "abc"
       is found at the end of $string. */

    eregi ("(ozilla.[23]|MSIE.3)", $HTTP_USER_AGENT);
    /* Returns true if client browser
       is Netscape 2, 3 or MSIE 3. */

    ereg ("([[:alnum:]]+) ([[:alnum:]]+) ([[:alnum:]]+)", $string,$regs);
    /* Places three space separated words
       into $regs[1], $regs[2] and $regs[3]. */

    $string = ereg_replace ("^", "<br />", $string);
    /* Put a <br /> tag at the beginning of $string. */

    $string = ereg_replace ("$", "<br />", $string);
    /* Put a <br />; tag at the end of $string. */

    $string = ereg_replace ("\n", "", $string);
    /* Get rid of any newline
       characters in $string. */

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