🐘🩳 PHP Shorts - Matching URLs or paths regex

README.md

ℹ️ This document is part of Potherca's Rules for creating more robust code in PHP

Don't use slash "/" as delimiter when matching URLS or paths

When working with regular expressions (regex) in PHP, it is quite common to use a forward slash (a.k.a. "slash) as delimiter for a regex pattern.

$match = preg_match('/abc/', $subject);

However, when the pattern is a path URL with a path, when a slash / is used as regex delimiter, slashes in the string need to be escaped.

This makes the text harder to parse for humans.

$match = preg_match('/http:\/\/example.com\/api/', $subject);

If another delimiter is used,¹ the slash no longer needs to be escaped:

$match = preg_match('#http://example.com/api#', $subject);

This also makes it more clear whether any trailing slash is a delimiter or part of the match pattern.

Footnotes

1. Often used delimiters are forward slashes (/), hash signs (#) and tildes (~).

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