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<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>
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<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>
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<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.
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