note 57309 deleted from function.ereg by nlopess

Note Submitter: spook #a-t# ec-league #d-o-t# net ---- QUOTE:" Beware that eregs in PHP4 are broken, for instance if you want to match "a to z, 0,9 and -" you might want to use [a-z0\-9] but it will silently fail due to a bug : the \ don't escape some special chars, so this regexp is equivalent to [a-z0-9] ! Also putting \[ or \] inside the brackets (to match for a bracket) doesn't work, or raises an error, but curiously putting the \- at the end works. So if you want to match '[a-z\|\[\]]' you have to type '([a-z]|\-|\[\|])' This isn't a misplaced bug report : I put this here so other users don't lose a few hours like I did tracking it down. Workaround : use preg, you'll be faster learning the preg syntax than trying to make ereg work by tweaking the expression. " :ENDOFQUOTE if you want a string to work that matches "a to z", "A to Z", "0 to 9", "-", "[", "]" and "_" you will have to use this expression: ([0-9a-zA-Z_]|\-|\[|\]) Note the difference to the expression in the quote - there is an error in it!!! Instead of ([a-z]|\-|\[\|]) it should be ([a-z]|\-|\[|\]) (the last backslash was misplaced...) Also contrary to what the quoted user wrote i suggest NOT using preg instead - If you want to check an entire string preg won't work. In my case i had to check a string that could have 2 to 15 (special) chars. preg_match only checked the first 2 chars, saw that these were good and stopped... ereg checks the whole string and even more important: returns the whole string in the given array $regs[0] unless parts of it did not match! if you compare $regs[0] with the string you just checked with ereg and they match the whole string passed your requirements.