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Finding Variable Names in Source Code
Sometimes we find ourselves in the middle of a job, unable to sort out a simple syntax problem. Regular expressions can be useful in many ways. If you wanted to locate references to variables in a PHP script, you could use a regular expression in your text editor to search for them. But how do you do that when you don’t know what the variable names are?
This regular expression matches all variable names in PHP. They always begin with a dollar and then a letter, but never a number:
\$[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]*
Note the two ranges, the second one being repeated as many times as required until we reach a nonalphanumeric ...
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