note 16701 deleted from ref.pcre by jimw

<p>There's lots of reasons why PHP doesn't support the syntactic sugar that Perl does for regular expressions.</p> <p>Not only would that mean they'd almost have to be built into PHP, rather than left as a loadable module, but I can't see how on earth you'd support both types.</p> <p>With my SysAdmin head on, one of my favourite features of PHP is that an installation can be cut down heavily to just those functions I want, which presumably means faster PHP, albeit probably only marginally.</p> <p>With my Developer head on, one of my favourite features of PHP is that is supports so much - sometimes I want POSIX regular expressions, sometimes I prefer Perl - the two have slightly different, sometimes crucial, semantics. One of my other favourite features of PHP is that the syntax is very pure, very simple, and very intuitive, making it more maintainable in my opinion.</p> <p>Finally, PHP is not Perl. This doesn't mean it's better, or worse - I happen to use both in commercial development, often with the same project - but it does mean it's different.</p>