<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <title>Introduction</title> </head> <body><div class="manualnavbar" style="text-align: center;"> <div class="prev" style="text-align: left; float: left;"><a href="book.regex.html">POSIX Regex</a></div> <div class="next" style="text-align: right; float: right;"><a href="regex.setup.html">Installing/Configuring</a></div> <div class="up"><a href="book.regex.html">POSIX Regex</a></div> <div class="home"><a href="index.html">PHP Manual</a></div> </div><hr /><div id="intro.regex" class="preface"> <h1 class="title">Introduction</h1> <div class="warning"><strong class="warning">Warning</strong> <p class="para"> This feature was <em class="emphasis">DEPRECATED</em> in PHP 5.3.0, and <em class="emphasis">REMOVED</em> in PHP 7.0.0. </p> <p class="para"> Alternatives to this feature include: </p> <ul class="simplelist"> <li class="member"> <a href="book.pcre.html" class="link">PCRE</a> (for full regular expression support) </li> <li class="member"> <span class="function"><a href="function.fnmatch.html" class="function">fnmatch()</a></span> (for simpler shell style wildcard pattern matching) </li> </ul> </div> <div class="tip"><strong class="tip">Tip</strong> <p class="para"> PHP also supports regular expressions using a Perl-compatible syntax using the <a href="book.pcre.html" class="link">PCRE functions</a>. Those functions support non-greedy matching, assertions, conditional subpatterns, and a number of other features not supported by the POSIX-extended regular expression syntax. </p> </div> <div class="warning"><strong class="warning">Warning</strong> <p class="para"> These regular expression functions are not binary-safe. The <a href="book.pcre.html" class="link">PCRE functions</a> are. </p> </div> <p class="para"> Regular expressions are used for complex string manipulation. PHP uses the POSIX extended regular expressions as defined by POSIX 1003.2. For a full description of POSIX regular expressions see the <a href="http://www.tin.org/bin/man.cgi?section=7&topic=regex" class="link external">» regex man pages</a> 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 <strong class="command">man /usr/local/src/regex/regex.7</strong> in order to read it. </p> </div><hr /><div class="manualnavbar" style="text-align: center;"> <div class="prev" style="text-align: left; float: left;"><a href="book.regex.html">POSIX Regex</a></div> <div class="next" style="text-align: right; float: right;"><a href="regex.setup.html">Installing/Configuring</a></div> <div class="up"><a href="book.regex.html">POSIX Regex</a></div> <div class="home"><a href="index.html">PHP Manual</a></div> </div></body></html>