ereg

Description

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

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.

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().