Re: Pre-RFC: adding a Regex\CompiledRegex class for compiling regular expressions

On Wed, Sep 23, 2026, at 21:01, Gina P. Banyard wrote: > This class could lay the foundation on which to build a new nice OO API Nice. I am in favor of improving the API, instead of slapping more flags onto the existing one. > the pattern *must* be a UTF-8 pattern Does this also apply to the subject? I recently had a reason to remove the u modifier from a regex: if the input is not valid UTF8, preg_match silently fails without a match. I think I was scraping web pages and discovered that some webpages don't contain valid UTF8, and that made it impossible to use preg_match with UTF8 on it. > returning a bool type Would it make more sense to return a Match object, with captured groups? The proposed API would result in calls like this: new CompiledRegex(".*", false, false, false, true, true, true, false, true) where it is hard to determine what all the true/false parameters mean. Would it be better to pass enums instead? Or is this solved by editor hints nowadays? Regards, Sjoerd Langkemper