ereg or preg

[Brain Storm]

ereg or preg, whats the difference?

[themarty]

preg is faster and more powerfull
you can also find this manual, btw

[NogDog]

The ereg functions support the POSIX regular expression standard. The preg functions are based on the regex syntax and functions used in the Perl language. The preg functions support a few more options -- as to whether it's faster than ereg, I don't know about that. I use the preg functions mainly because I learned Perl before I learned PHP.

[themarty]

@NogDog

-- from http://www.php.net/ereg

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().

[bokeh]

As pointed out above:

• ereg == POSIX
• preg == PCRE

The most important difference (in my opinion) is that POSIX does not support lazy quantifiers.

[Brain Storm]

preg is faster

Is that true?

The most important difference (in my opinion) is that POSIX does not support lazy quantifiers.

What does that mean?

[themarty]

Is that true?

just take a look at the quote in my second post.
and if you don't believe that, you could always benchmark it yourself

What does that mean?

he's probably refering to the fact that posix doesn't support non-greedy matching

[bokeh]

just take a look at the quote in my second post.
and if you don't believe that, you could always benchmark it yourself

Benchmarking proves that statment to be completely untrue by a factor of 10x (even more with long strings).

One other difference is they match 2 different things. PCRE matches the first found left most match whereas POSIX matches the longest left most match.

<?php

$regex = 'cat|category';
$target = 'category';

echo '<p>ereg: ' . (ereg($regex, $target, $match)? $match[0] : 'false').'</p>'; // category

echo '<p>preg: ' . (preg_match('/'.$regex.'/', $target, $match)? $match[0] : 'false').'</p>'; // cat

?>