PHP Manual
Prev |  | Next

# ereg

(PHP 3, PHP 4, PHP 5)

ereg -- Regular expression match

## Description

int ereg ( string pattern, string string [, array &regs] )

> Note: preg_match(), which uses a Perl-compatible regular expression syntax, is often a faster alternative to ereg().

Searches a string for matches to the regular expression given in pattern in a case-sensitive way.

If matches are found for parenthesized substrings of pattern and the function is called with the third argument regs, the matches will be stored in the elements of the array regs. $regs[1] will contain the substring which starts at the first left parenthesis; $regs[2] will contain the substring starting at the second, and so on. $regs[0] will contain a copy of the complete string matched.

> Note: Up to (and including) PHP 4.1.0 $regs will be filled with exactly ten elements, even though more or fewer than ten parenthesized substrings may actually have matched. This has no effect on ereg()'s ability to match more substrings. If no matches are found, $regs will not be altered by ereg().

Returns the length of the matched string if a match for pattern was found in string, or `FALSE` if no matches were found or an error occurred. If the optional parameter regs was not passed or the length of the matched string is 0, this function returns 1.

The following code snippet takes a date in ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD) and prints it in DD.MM.YYYY format:

Example 1. ereg() example
`<?php if (ereg ("([0-9]{4})-([0-9]{1,2})-([0-9]{1,2})", $date, $regs)) { echo "$regs[3].$regs[2].$regs[1]"; } else { echo "Invalid date format: $date"; } ?>`

See also eregi(), ereg_replace(), eregi_replace(), preg_match(), strpos(), and strstr().

Prev | Home | Next
ereg_replace | Up | eregi_replace