How to change PHP's eregi to preg_match
email, pcre, php, posix-ere
Solution
Perl-style regex patterns always need to be delimited. The very first character in the string is considered the delimiter, so something like this:
function validate_email($email) {
if (!preg_match("/^[[:alnum:]][a-z0-9_.-]*@[a-z0-9.-]+\.[a-z]{2,4}$/i", $email)) {
echo 'bad email';
} else {
echo 'good email';
}
}
The reason your initial attempt didn't work is because it was trying to use `^` as the delimiter character but (obviously) found no matching `^` for the end of the regex.
Problem
Possible Duplicate: How can I convert ereg expressions to preg in PHP? I need help, below is a small VERY basic regex to somewhat validate an email, I do realize it does not work the greatest but for my needs it is ok for now. It currently uses PHP's eregi function which php.net says is now a depreciated function and I should use preg_match instead, simply replacing erei with preg_match does not work, can someone show me how to make it work? ``` function validate_email($email) { if (!eregi("^[[:alnum:]][a-z0-9_.-]*@[a-z0-9.-]+\.[a-z]{2,4}$", $email)) { echo 'bad email'; } else { echo 'good email'; } } function validate_email($email) { if (!preg_match("^[[:alnum:]][a-z0-9_.-]*@[a-z0-9.-]+\.[a-z]{2,4}$", $email)) { echo 'bad email'; } else { echo 'good email'; } } ```