Re: preg_match

Hi Rafael :-), On 08/07/11 15:18, Rafael Dohms wrote:

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 9:20 AM, Nikita Popov<nikita.ppv@googlemail.com> wrote:

The most common use for preg_match is validation: if (!preg_match('~...~', $string)) { /* do something */ } Here $matches is not required, only the 0/1 return value of preg_match is of interest. Furthermore, even if you need $matches, you should always combine it with an if: if (!preg_match('~...~', $string, $matches)) { /* do something with $matches */ } Otherwise you will access $matches even though the match failed (which will result in errors). Thus: There is no need to change behavior here.

That is just one use case as i see it its very cluncky to use this in case you want to extract matches, you need to initilize the $matches variable beforehad or you get a notice, so a simple extract is now 3 lines of code. Thus, that is the reason why i suggest a new preg_extract function that would handle the other use cases in a optimized way. Here is my proposition:

function preg_extract ( $pattern, $subject ) {

    return false !== preg_match($pattern, $subject, $matches)
               ? $matches
               : false;

} I think it is the trick you are looking for. But making a dedicated C implementation is not necessary IMHO. Best regards. -- Ivan Enderlin Developer of Hoa Framework http://hoa.42/ or http://hoa-project.net/ Member of HTML and WebApps Working Group of W3C http://w3.org/