Perl-Compatible Regular Expression Functions
Perl-compatible regular expression (PCRE) functions bring Perl’s parsing power to PHP. The syntax of the regular expression patterns is almost the same as Perl’s, except for a few custom PHP-specific modifications. Every pattern should be enclosed by the delimiters. Any character can be used as a delimiter as long as it’s not alphanumeric or a backslash. When the delimiter character has to be used in the pattern itself, it needs to be escaped by a backslash. As in Perl, the ending delimiter may be followed by optional modifiers that affect how the matching and pattern processing is done.
The complete syntax of PCRE patterns is described online at www.php.net/manual/en/pcre.pattern.syntax.php.
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