XCVI. Regular Expression Functions (Perl-Compatible)

Introdução

The syntax for patterns used in these functions closely resembles Perl. The expression should be enclosed in the delimiters, a forward slash (/), for example. Any character can be used for delimiter as long as it's not alphanumeric or backslash (\). If the delimiter character has to be used in the expression itself, it needs to be escaped by backslash. Since PHP 4.0.4, you can also use Perl-style (), {}, [], and <> matching delimiters. See Pattern Syntax for detailed explanation.

The ending delimiter may be followed by various modifiers that affect the matching. See Pattern Modifiers.

PHP also supports regular expressions using a POSIX-extended syntax using the POSIX-extended regex functions.

Atenção

You should be aware of some limitations of PCRE. Read http://www.pcre.org/pcre.txt for more info.

Dependências

Regular expression support is provided by the PCRE library package, which is open source software, written by Philip Hazel, and copyright by the University of Cambridge, England. It is available at ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/.

Instalação

Beginning with PHP 4.2.0 these functions are enabled by default. You can disable the pcre functions with --without-pcre-regex. Use --with-pcre-regex=DIR to specify DIR where PCRE's include and library files are located, if not using bundled library. For older versions you have to configure and compile PHP with --with-pcre-regex[=DIR] in order to use these functions.

A versão para Windows do PHP tem suporte embutido para esta extensão. Você não precisa carregar nenhuma extensão adicional para utilizar essas funções.

Configurações em execução

Esta extensão não define nenhum parâmetro de configuração no php.ini.

Tipos Resource

Esta extensão não possui nenhum tipo resource.

Constantes pré-definidas

As contantes abaixo são definidas por esta extensão e somente estarão disponíveis quando a extensão foi compilada com o PHP ou carregada dinamicamente durante a execução.

Tabela 1. PREG constants

constantdescription
PREG_PATTERN_ORDER Orders results so that $matches[0] is an array of full pattern matches, $matches[1] is an array of strings matched by the first parenthesized subpattern, and so on. This flag is only used with preg_match_all().
PREG_SET_ORDER Orders results so that $matches[0] is an array of first set of matches, $matches[1] is an array of second set of matches, and so on. This flag is only used with preg_match_all().
PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE See the description of PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE. This flag is available since PHP 4.3.0.
PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY This flag tells preg_split() to return only non-empty pieces.
PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE This flag tells preg_split() to capture parenthesized expression in the delimiter pattern as well. This flag is available since PHP 4.0.5.
PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE If this flag is set, for every occurring match the appendant string offset will also be returned. Note that this changes the return values in an array where every element is an array consisting of the matched string at offset 0 and its string offset within subject at offset 1. This flag is available since PHP 4.3.0 and is only used for preg_split().

Exemplos

Exemplo 1. Examples of valid patterns

  • /<\/\w+>/

  • |(\d{3})-\d+|Sm

  • /^(?i)php[34]/

  • {^\s+(\s+)?$}

Exemplo 2. Examples of invalid patterns

  • /href='(.*)' - missing ending delimiter

  • /\w+\s*\w+/J - unknown modifier 'J'

  • 1-\d3-\d3-\d4| - missing starting delimiter

Índice
Pattern Modifiers -- Describes possible modifiers in regex patterns
Pattern Syntax -- Describes PCRE regex syntax
preg_grep --  Return array entries that match the pattern
preg_match_all -- Perform a global regular expression match
preg_match -- Perform a regular expression match
preg_quote -- Quote regular expression characters
preg_replace_callback -- Perform a regular expression search and replace using a callback
preg_replace -- Perform a regular expression search and replace
preg_split -- Split string by a regular expression