Re: regex drive me crazy

Am Mittwoch, 01.10.03 um 22:27 Uhr schrieb Chris W. Parker:

Seeing as how you haven't had a response yet, I'll ask this: what exactly is your question? I'm not sure as to what it is that you want.

My question are: a) Why does the PHP manual say that backslashes get escaped by writing them twice while this causes an error in my example (see below)? b) Why does a different input (2.1. and 2.2.) result in the same output (in the example I enclosed)? c) Why do I hate regular expressions so much? Choose one. - Jns 8<

1. The PHP manual sais to escape the escape char, it has to be written twice*, but: $term = preg_replace('/(\\)/', 'backslash $1', $term); causes an error** while using three backslashes (see 2.) works. 2.1. $term = "beg \ end"; print preg_replace('/(\\\)/', 'backslash $1', $term); returns: beg backslash \ end 2.2. $term = "beg \\ end"; print preg_replace('/(\\\)/', 'backslash $1', $term); returns: beg backslash \ end (the same as 2.1.) 2.3. $term = "beg \\\ end"; print preg_replace('/(\\\)/', 'backslash $1', $term); returns: beg backslash \backslash \ end * http://www.php.net/manual/en/pcre.pattern.syntax.php ** "Warning: Compilation failed: missing ) at offset 3 in /home/jonas/public_html/test01.php on line 3"