PHP - Regular
Expressions
Regular
• Regular expressions
expressions are sequence or
pattern of characters
• It provides pattern-matching functionality
• Used to search a particular string
inside a another string
• Validate input such as email address,
domain names, telephone numbers, IP
addresses and so on
• Regular expression functions supported by
PHP
– PERL Style Regular Expressions
– POSIX Regular Expressions
PERL Compatible
Functions
• preg_match
– It is used to perform a pattern match on a string.
– It returns true if a match is found and false if a
match is not found.
• preg_split
– It is used to perform a pattern match on a
string and then split the results into a numeric
array
• preg_replace
– It is used to perform a pattern match on a string
and then replace the match with the specified
Synta
x
<?php
function_name('/pattern/', source);
?>
• /…/ The forward slashes denote the
beginning and end of our regular
expression
• ‘/pattern/’ is the pattern that we need
to matched
• Source is the text string to be matched
against
Brackets
[] used to find a
– Brackets ([]) are
range of characters.
– [0-9] : It matches any decimal digit from 0
through 9.
– [a-z]: It matches any character from
lower-case a through lowercase z.
– [A-Z]: It matches any character from
uppercase A through uppercase Z.
– [a-Z]: It matches any character from
lowercase a through uppercase Z.
Quantifie
rs of bracketed
• Frequency or position
character sequences and single characters
• can be denoted
. (dot)
– Matches any single character except a new line
• p+
– It matches any string containing at least one
p.
• p*
– It matches any string containing zero or
more p's.
• p?
Quantifiers
• $
(Contd..)
– It matches any string at end of it.
• ^
– It matches any string from the beginning of it
• p{N}
– It matches any string containing a sequence of N p's
• p{2,3}
– It matches any string containing a sequence of
two or three p's.
• p{2, }
– It matches any string containing a sequence of at
least two p's.
Exampl
• [^a-zA-Z] es
– It matches any string not containing any of the
characters ranging from a through z and A through
Z.
• p.p
– It matches any string containing p, followed by
any character, in turn followed by another p.
• ^.{2}$
– It matches any string containing exactly two
characters.
• <b>(.*)</b>
– It matches any string enclosed within <b> and </b>.
• p(hp)*
– It matches any string containing a p followed by
Predefined Character
Ranges
• [[:alpha:]]
– It matches any string containing alphabetic
characters aA through zZ.
• [[:digit:]]
– It matches any string containing numerical
digits 0 through 9.
• [[:alnum:]]
– It matches any string containing
alphanumeric characters aA through zZ
and 0 through 9.
• [[:space:]]
– It matches any string containing a space.
PERL Style Regular
Expressions
• PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular
Expressions) library which is enabled
in almost all PHP installations.
Meta
•
characters
Meta character is simply an alphabetical
character preceded by a backslash
• .
– a single character
• \s
– a whitespace character (space, tab, newline)
• \S
– non-whitespace character
• \d
– a digit (0-9)
• \D
– a non-digit
• \w
– a word character (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _)
• \W
– a non-word character
• [aeiou]
– matches a single character in the given set
• [^aeiou]
– matches a single character outside the
given set
• (foo|bar|baz)
Modifier
•i
s
– Makes the match case insensitive
•o
– Evaluates the expression only once
•s
– Allows use of . to match a newline
character
•x
– Allows you to use white space in the
expression for clarity
• g
– Globally finds all matches
• cg
– Allows a search to continue even after a global
match fails
• m
– Specifies that if the string has newline or
carriage return characters, the ^ and $
operators will now match against a newline
boundary, instead of a string boundary
