Regular Expression Functions (Perl-Compatible)

Introduction

The syntax for patterns used in these functions closely resembles Perl. The expression should be enclosed in the delimiters, a forward slash (/), for example. Any character can be used for delimiter as long as it's not alphanumeric or backslash (\). If the delimiter character has to be used in the expression itself, it needs to be escaped by backslash. Since PHP 4.0.4, you can also use Perl-style (), {}, [], and <> matching delimiters. See Pattern Syntax for detailed explanation.

The ending delimiter may be followed by various modifiers that affect the matching. See Pattern Modifiers.

PHP also supports regular expressions using a POSIX-extended syntax using the POSIX-extended regex functions.

Note:

This extension maintains a global per-thread cache of compiled regular expressions (up to 4096).

Warning:

You should be aware of some limitations of PCRE. Read » http://www.pcre.org/pcre.txt for more info.

Requirements

No external libraries are needed to build this extension.

Installation

Beginning with PHP 4.2.0 these functions are enabled by default. You can disable the pcre functions with --without-pcre-regex. Use --with-pcre-regex=DIR to specify DIR where PCRE's include and library files are located, if not using bundled library. For older versions you have to configure and compile PHP with --with-pcre-regex[=DIR] in order to use these functions.

The windows version of PHP has built in support for this extension. You do not need to load any additional extension in order to use these functions.

Runtime Configuration

The behaviour of these functions is affected by settings in php.ini.

Table 243. PCRE Configuration Options

Name	Default	Changeable	Changelog
pcre.backtrack_limit	"100000"	PHP_INI_ALL	Available since PHP 5.2.0.
pcre.recursion_limit	"100000"	PHP_INI_ALL	Available since PHP 5.2.0.

For further details and definitions of the PHP_INI_* constants, see the Appendix I, php.ini directives.

Here's a short explanation of the configuration directives.

pcre.backtrack_limit integer: PCRE's backtracking limit.
pcre.recursion_limit integer: PCRE's recursion limit. Please note that if you set this value to a high number you may consume all the available process stack and eventually crash PHP (due to reaching the stack size limit imposed by the Operating System).

Resource Types

This extension has no resource types defined.

Predefined Constants

The constants below are defined by this extension, and will only be available when the extension has either been compiled into PHP or dynamically loaded at runtime.

Table 244. PREG constants

constant	description
`PREG_PATTERN_ORDER`	Orders results so that $matches[0] is an array of full pattern matches, $matches[1] is an array of strings matched by the first parenthesized subpattern, and so on. This flag is only used with preg_match_all().
`PREG_SET_ORDER`	Orders results so that $matches[0] is an array of first set of matches, $matches[1] is an array of second set of matches, and so on. This flag is only used with preg_match_all().
`PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE`	See the description of `PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE`. This flag is available since PHP 4.3.0.
`PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY`	This flag tells preg_split() to return only non-empty pieces.
`PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE`	This flag tells preg_split() to capture parenthesized expression in the delimiter pattern as well. This flag is available since PHP 4.0.5.
`PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE`	If this flag is set, for every occurring match the appendant string offset will also be returned. Note that this changes the return values in an array where every element is an array consisting of the matched string at offset 0 and its string offset within subject at offset 1. This flag is available since PHP 4.3.0 and is only used for preg_split().
`PREG_NO_ERROR`	Returned by preg_last_error() if there were no errors. Available since PHP 5.2.0.
`PREG_INTERNAL_ERROR`	Returned by preg_last_error() if there was an internal PCRE error. Available since PHP 5.2.0.
`PREG_BACKTRACK_LIMIT_ERROR`	Returned by preg_last_error() if backtrack limit was exhausted. Available since PHP 5.2.0.
`PREG_RECURSION_LIMIT_ERROR`	Returned by preg_last_error() if recursion limit was exhausted. Available since PHP 5.2.0.
`PREG_BAD_UTF8_ERROR`	Returned by preg_last_error() if the last error was caused by malformed UTF-8 data (only when running a regex in UTF-8 mode). Available since PHP 5.2.0.
`PCRE_VERSION`	PCRE version and release date (e.g. "7.0 18-Dec-2006"). Available since PHP 5.2.4.

Examples

Example 1713. Examples of valid patterns

/<\/\w+>/
|(\d{3})-\d+|Sm
/^(?i)php[34]/
{^\s+(\s+)?$}

Example 1714. Examples of invalid patterns

/href='(.*)' - missing ending delimiter
/\w+\s*\w+/J - unknown modifier 'J'
1-\d3-\d3-\d4| - missing starting delimiter

Table of Contents

Pattern Modifiers — Describes possible modifiers in regex patterns
Pattern Syntax — Describes PCRE regex syntax
preg_grep — Return array entries that match the pattern
preg_last_error — Returns the error code of the last PCRE regex execution
preg_match_all — Perform a global regular expression match
preg_match — Perform a regular expression match
preg_quote — Quote regular expression characters
preg_replace_callback — Perform a regular expression search and replace using a callback
preg_replace — Perform a regular expression search and replace
preg_split — Split string by a regular expression

PCRE faster than POSIX RE? Not always. In a recent search-engine project here at Cynergi, I had a simple loop with a few cute ereg_replace() functions that took 3min to process data. I changed that 10-line loop into a 100-line hand-written code for replacement and the loop now took 10s to process the same data! This opened my eye to what can *IN SOME CASES* be very slow regular expressions. Lately I decided to look into Perl-compatible regular expressions (PCRE). Most pages claim PCRE are faster than POSIX, but a few claim otherwise. I decided on bechmarks of my own. My first few tests confirmed PCRE to be faster, but... the results were slightly different than others were getting, so I decided to benchmark every case of RE usage I had on a 8000-line secure (and fast) Webmail project here at Cynergi to check it out. The results? Inconclusive! Sometimes PCRE *are* faster (sometimes by a factor greater than 100x faster!), but some other times POSIX RE are faster (by a factor of 2x). I still have to find a rule on when are one or the other faster. It's not only about search data size, amount of data matched, or "RE compilation time" which would show when you repeated the function often: one would *always* be faster than the other. But I didn't find a pattern here. But truth be said, I also didn't take the time to look into the source code and analyse the problem. I can give you some examples, though. The POSIX RE ([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})[^0-9]+ ([0-9]{2}):([0-9]{2}):([0-9]{2}) is 30% faster in POSIX than when converted to PCRE (even if you use \d and \D and non-greedy matching). On the other hand, a similarly PCRE complex pattern /[0-9]{1,2}[ \t]+[a-zA-Z]{3}[ \t]+[0-9]{4}[ \t]+[0-9]{1,2}:[0-9]{1,2}(:[0-9]{1,2})?[ \t]+[+-][0-9]{4}/ is 2.5x faster in PCRE than in POSIX RE. Simple replacement patterns like ereg_replace( "[^a-zA-Z0-9-]+", "", $m ); are 2x faster in POSIX RE than PCRE. And then we get confused again because a POSIX RE pattern like (^|\n|\r)begin-base64[ \t]+[0-7]{3,4}[ \t]+...... is 2x faster as POSIX RE, but the case-insensitive PCRE /^Received[ \t]*:[ \t]*by[ \t]+([^ \t]+)[ \t]/i is 30x faster than its POSIX RE version! When it comes to case sensitivity, PCRE has so far seemed to be the best option. But I found some really strange behaviour from ereg/eregi. On a very simple POSIX RE (^|\r|\n)mime-version[ \t]*: I found eregi() taking 3.60s (just a number in a test benchmark), while the corresponding PCRE took 0.16s! But if I used ereg() (case-sensitive) the POSIX RE time went down to 0.08s! So I investigated further. I tried to make the POSIX RE case-insensitive itself. I got as far as this: (^|\r|\n)[mM][iI][mM][eE]-vers[iI][oO][nN][ \t]*: This version also took 0.08s. But if I try to apply the same rule to any of the 'v', 'e', 'r' or 's' letters that are not changed, the time is back to the 3.60s mark, and not gradually, but immediatelly so! The test data didn't have any "vers" in it, other "mime" words in it or any "ion" that might be confusing the POSIX parser, so I'm at a loss. Bottom line: always benchmark your PCRE / POSIX RE to find the fastest! Tests were performed with PHP 5.1.2 under Windows, from the command line. Pedro Freire cynergi.com