ereg

Description

Searches a string for matches to the regular expression given in pattern.

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 string.

If ereg() finds any matches at all, $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().

Searching is case sensitive.

Returns TRUE if a match for pattern was found in string, or FALSE if no matches were found or an error occurred.

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 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() and preg_match().