note 94678 modified in function.preg-match by danbrown

I spent a while replacing all my ereg() calls to preg_match(), since ereg() is now deprecated and will not be supported as of v 6.0. Just a warning regarding the conversion, the two functions behave very similarly, but not exactly alike. Obviously, you will need to delimit your pattern with '/' or '|' characters. The difference that stumped me was that preg_replace overwrites the $matches array regardless if a match was found. If no match was found, $matches is simply empty. ereg(), however, would leave $matches alone if a match was not found. In my code, I had repeated calls to ereg, and was populating $matches with each match. I was only interested in the last match. However, with preg_match, if the very last call to the function did not result in a match, the $matches array would be overwritten with a blank value. Here is an example code snippet to illustrate: <?php $test = array('yes','no','yes','no','yes','no'); foreach ($test as $key=>$value) { ereg("yes",$value,$matches1); preg_match("|yes|",$value,$matches2); } print "ereg result: $matches1[0]<br>"; print "preg_match result: $matches2[0]<br>"; ?> The output is: ereg result: yes preg_match result: ($matches2[0] in this case is empty) I believe the preg_match behavior is cleaner. I just thought I would report this to hopefully save others some time. --was-- I spent a while replacing all my ereg() calls to preg_match(), since ereg() is now deprecated and will not be supported as of v 6.0. Just a warning regarding the conversion, the two functions behave very similarly, but not exactly alike. Obviously, you will need to delimit your pattern with '/' or '|' characters. The difference that stumped me was that preg_replace overwrites the $matches array regardless if a match was found. If no match was found, $matches is simply empty. ereg(), however, would leave $matches alone if a match was not found. In my code, I had repeated calls to ereg, and was populating $matches with each match. I was only interested in the last match. However, with preg_match, if the very last call to the function did not result in a match, the $matches array would be overwritten with a blank value. Here is an example code snippet to illustrate: <? $test = array('yes','no','yes','no','yes','no'); foreach ($test as $key=>$value) { ereg("yes",$value,$matches1); preg_match("|yes|",$value,$matches2); } print "ereg result: $matches1[0]<br>"; print "preg_match result: $matches2[0]<br>"; ?> The output is: ereg result: yes preg_match result: ($matches2[0] in this case is empty) I believe the preg_match behavior is cleaner. I just thought I would report this to hopefully save others some time. http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php