Delimited patterns

Delimited pattern

Method Pattern.delimited() returns regular expression as string, representing the pattern in format compatible with with PHP PCRE methods.

echo pattern('https://github.com#heading')->delimited();

%https://github.com#heading%

PCRE-style patterns

If the Pattern was constructed with PcrePattern::of(), method delimited() returns the pattern unchanged.

PcrePattern::of('#Welcome/Or not#')->delimited();

#Welcome/Or not#

However, certain regular expressions will be modified to allow safe execution. For example, pattern /\c\/
fails matching in vanilla PHP, so such pattern is delimited in other ways, to ensure proper execution.

preg_match('/\c\/', $subject); // fails matching

PcrePattern::of('/\c\/')->test($subject); // works just fine

Modifiers

There are two ways of using patterns with PCRE modifiers:

• Either pass a second argument to pattern()/Pattern::of():

  // global function

  pattern('[A-Z][a-z]+', 'i')->test($subject);

  // static method

  Pattern::of('[A-Z][a-z]+', 'i')->test($subject);

  // prepared patterns

  Pattern::inject('[A-Z]@', [$_GET['name']], 'i')->test($subject);

• or use an old-school pattern:

  PcrePattern::of('/[A-Z][a-z]+/i')->search($subject)->first();