PHP - moving from ereg to preg for regular expressions
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2011-11-11 20:27:50 - Graham EllisIf your PHP scripts use "ereg" functions for regular expression matching, you should be aware that as from PHP version 5.3 they have been deprecated, and in PHP 6.0 the plan is to remove them completely.
The regular expressions move from the POSIX standard to the Perl standard. The function names change. Delimiters are added to the regular expression in the preg functions, with modifiers supported. There's a simple example [here].
So
if (eregi('[A-Z]{1,2}[0-9]{1,2} {0,}[0-9]{1}[A-Z]{2}',$code))becomes
if (preg_match('/[A-Z]{1,2}[0-9]{1,2} {0,}[0-9]{1}[A-Z]{2}/i',$code))Here's a table showing the old ereg names and the preg functions which may replace them:
| in old code | are replaced by |
|---|---|
| ereg and eregi | preg_match or preg_match_all |
| ereg_replace and eregi_replace | preg_replace or preg_filter or preg_replace_callback |
| split and spliti | preg_split |
| - | preg_grep and preg_quote |