note 2333 deleted from preg_quote by mohrt

A good example of this is if you want to use a variable as search content that may contain characters with special meaning to PCRE. Here I am making every occurance of $word italicized in $textbody. The variable $word may contain special characters and they will not affect the regular expression: $textbody = preg_replace("|b".preg_quote($word)."b|","<i>".$word."</i>",$textbody);