# Introduction

Warning

This feature was DEPRECATED in PHP 5.3.0, and REMOVED in PHP 7.0.0.

Alternatives to this feature include:

- PCRE (for full regular expression support)
- fnmatch() (for simpler shell style wildcard pattern matching)

Tip

PHP also supports regular expressions using a Perl-compatible syntax using the PCRE functions. Those functions support non-greedy matching, assertions, conditional subpatterns, and a number of other features not supported by the POSIX-extended regular expression syntax.

Warning

These regular expression functions are not binary-safe. The PCRE functions are.

Regular expressions are used for complex string manipulation. PHP uses the POSIX extended regular expressions as defined by POSIX 1003.2. For a full description of POSIX regular expressions see the » regex man pages included in the regex directory in the PHP distribution. It's in manpage format, so you'll want to do something along the lines of man /usr/local/src/regex/regex.7 in order to read it.