How to replace ereg?

php regex pcre posix-ere
Shawn picture Shawn · Feb 7, 2010 · Viewed 23.4k times · Source

I'm getting the following message for some php I have to use but did not write:

Deprecated: Function ereg() is deprecated in /opt/lampp/htdocs/webEchange/SiteWeb_V5/inc/html2fpdf.php on line 466

This is line 466:

if(ereg('^([^=]*)=["\']?([^"\']*)["\']?$',$v,$a3))

I tried simply replacing with preg_match, but it couldn't recognize the = modifier in the regular expression.. I'm not too good with regular expression yet and solving this requires that I learn the regexp ereg needs AND the regexp preg_match needs (which, if I am not mistaken, is different)... Could you guys help me out with this one?

Thanks

Answer

Gumbo picture Gumbo · Feb 7, 2010

POSIX extended regular expressions (POSIX ERE, used by ereg) and Perl-combatible regular expressions (PCRE, used by preg_match) are very similar. Except from some special POSIX expressions, PCRE is a superset of POSIX ERE.

That means you just need to put your POSIX ERE regular expressions into delimiters (here /) and escape any occurrence of that character inside the regular expression and you have a valid PCRE regular expression:

/^([^=]*)=["']?([^"']*)["']?$/

So:

preg_match('/^([^=]*)=["\']?([^"\']*)["\']?$/', $v, $a3)

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