Wondering why your preg_replace fails, even if you have used preg_quote?
Try adding the delimiter / - preg_quote($string, '/');
(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7)
preg_quote — Quote regular expression characters
$str
[, string $delimiter
= NULL
] )
preg_quote() takes str
and puts a backslash in front of every character that is part of
the regular expression syntax. This is useful if you have a
run-time string that you need to match in some text and the
string may contain special regex characters.
The special regular expression characters are: . \ + * ? [ ^ ] $ ( ) { } = ! < > | : -
str
The input string.
delimiter
If the optional delimiter
is specified, it
will also be escaped. This is useful for escaping the delimiter
that is required by the PCRE functions. The / is the most commonly
used delimiter.
Returns the quoted (escaped) string.
Version | Description |
---|---|
5.3.0 | The - character is now quoted |
Example #1 preg_quote() example
<?php
$keywords = '$40 for a g3/400';
$keywords = preg_quote($keywords, '/');
echo $keywords; // returns \$40 for a g3\/400
?>
Example #2 Italicizing a word within some text
<?php
// In this example, preg_quote($word) is used to keep the
// asterisks from having special meaning to the regular
// expression.
$textbody = "This book is *very* difficult to find.";
$word = "*very*";
$textbody = preg_replace ("/" . preg_quote($word, '/') . "/",
"<i>" . $word . "</i>",
$textbody);
?>
Note: This function is binary-safe.
Wondering why your preg_replace fails, even if you have used preg_quote?
Try adding the delimiter / - preg_quote($string, '/');
Note that slash '/' is not one of the special characters, the italic writing of the list above makes pipe '|' look like '/'.
To bizzigul at hotmail dot fr:
It's not a good practice to make somthing work *almost* all of the time. If the input contains a '`' you will still get an error. I recommend using the default delimiter ('/') and also feed this to preg_quote as second argument.
To escape characters with special meaning, like: .-[]() and so on, use \Q and \E.
For example:
<?php echo ( preg_match('/^'.( $myvar = 'te.t' ).'$/i', 'test') ? 'match' : 'nomatch' ); ?>
Will result in: match
But:
<?php echo ( preg_match('/^\Q'.( $myvar = 'te.t' ).'\E$/i', 'test') ? 'match' : 'nomatch' ); ?>
Will result in: nomatch
I wanted to escape a string of characters so I could match them in [], i.e. [.,-!"§$%\\\[\]\^].
Unfortunately preg_quote does not escape the - character which has a special meaning in [], i.e. [a-z].
So I used this hack: make - the delimiter of the expression, i.e.
preg_quote(userinput, "-")
preg_replace("-[$userinput]-u", "", $str)
Apparently using a special char as a delimiter of a regular expression disables this character, i.e. even if it's escaped it's not understood as special character for the expression anymore.
so the pattern "-[a\\-z]-u" matches the characters a, - and z, and not abc...xyz.
It would be nice if preg_quote also escaped characters that have special meanings even if they have this meaning only under certain conditions, such as inside [].
To prevent any problems, try to always use a delimiter that will *almost* not be used inside the regex, such as ` (back quote)
for example: instead of
<?php preg_match('/foo\/bar\//',$somevar); ?>
use
<?php preg_match('`foo/bar/`',$somevar); ?>
it's that simple! like this, you won't have to bother with delimiters anymore...