Predefined Constants

The constants below are defined by this extension, and will only be available when the extension has either been compiled into PHP or dynamically loaded at runtime.

PREG constants

Constants	Description	As of
PREG_PATTERN_ORDER (int)	Orders results so that $matches[0] is an array of full pattern matches, $matches[1] is an array of strings matched by the first parenthesized subpattern, and so on. This flag is only used with preg_match_all().
PREG_SET_ORDER (int)	Orders results so that $matches[0] is an array of first set of matches, $matches[1] is an array of second set of matches, and so on. This flag is only used with preg_match_all().
PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE (int)	If this flag is set, for every occurring match the appendant byte offset will also be returned. Note that this changes the return values in an array where every element is an array consisting of the matched string at offset 0 and its string offset within subject at offset 1.
PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY (int)	This flag tells preg_split() to return only non-empty pieces.
PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE (int)	This flag tells preg_split() to capture parenthesized expression in the delimiter pattern as well.
PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE (int)	See the description of PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE. This flag is only used for preg_split().
PREG_UNMATCHED_AS_NULL (int)	This flag tells preg_match() and preg_match_all() to include unmatched subpatterns in $matches as null values. Without this flag, unmatched subpatterns are reported as empty strings, as if they were empty matches. Setting this flag allows to distinguish between these two cases.	7.2.0
PREG_NO_ERROR (int)	Returned by preg_last_error() if there were no errors.	5.2.0
PREG_INTERNAL_ERROR (int)	Returned by preg_last_error() if there was an internal PCRE error.	5.2.0
PREG_BACKTRACK_LIMIT_ERROR (int)	Returned by preg_last_error() if backtrack limit was exhausted.	5.2.0
PREG_RECURSION_LIMIT_ERROR (int)	Returned by preg_last_error() if recursion limit was exhausted.	5.2.0
PREG_BAD_UTF8_ERROR (int)	Returned by preg_last_error() if the last error was caused by malformed UTF-8 data (only when running a regex in UTF-8 mode).	5.2.0
PREG_BAD_UTF8_OFFSET_ERROR (int)	Returned by preg_last_error() if the offset didn't correspond to the begin of a valid UTF-8 code point (only when running a regex in UTF-8 mode).	5.3.0
PREG_JIT_STACKLIMIT_ERROR (int)	Returned by preg_last_error() if the last PCRE function failed due to limited JIT stack space.	7.0.0
PCRE_VERSION (string)	PCRE version and release date (e.g. "7.0 18-Dec-2006").	5.2.4
PCRE_VERSION_MAJOR (int)	PCRE major version number.
PCRE_VERSION_MINOR (int)	PCRE minor version number.
PCRE_JIT_SUPPORT (bool)	Indicates whether PCRE JIT support is available.
PREG_GREP_INVERT (int)	Return the elements that do not match a given pattern.