Edit report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52962&edit=1
ID: 52962 Updated by: cataphr...@php.net Reported by: rewilliams at crystaltech dot com Summary: preg_replace should allow all special characters to be escaped -Status: Open +Status: Bogus Type: Bug Package: PCRE related Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 PHP Version: 5.3.3 Block user comment: N New Comment: This doesn't make sense. The replacement string is not a regular expression, the only characters with special meaning are \ and $ because they introduce the placeholders. In your solution, you would just be forced to escape characters that don't need escaping at all. In any case, definitely not a bug. Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-10-01 02:49:35] rewilliams at crystaltech dot com Description: ------------ One can use preg_quote() to prep a string for use as the search string with preg_replace() and family. However, attempting to pass a string escaped by preg_quote() into preg_replace() as the replacement string does not work because all PCRE-special characters (such as '+') are escaped, but only '$' and '\' are unescaped by preg_replace(). IOW, this: $result = preg_replace("/bar/", '\\\\BAR\$\+', 'foo bar baz'); yields: foo \BAR$\+ baz preg_replace() should treat all escaped characters equally so that one can simply call preg_quote() and be done with it. As it is now, one must do something like this: $safeReplacementString = str_replace(array('\\', '$'), array('\\\\', '\\$'), $replacementString); to avoid problems. Not is that an ugly solution, but I strongly suspect that most code out there doesn't do it. Expected result: ---------------- The preg_replace() family of functions should accept any escaped PCRE special character sequence in the replacement text and treat it like the literal equivalent. Thus, '\+' should be treated as the literal '+'. Actual result: -------------- Presently, the preg_replace() family of functions only accept escaped sequences for '\' and '$'. If other PCRE-special characters, such as '+' or '*', are passed into the replacement string, the escape sequences (e.g., '/+') are left intact in the output result. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52962&edit=1