PHP: preg_match - "The delimiter must not be alphanumeric or backslash"

Question

Does anyone know what is wrong with this regex? It works fine on sites like RegexPal and RegExr, but in PHP it gives me this warning and no results:

Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Delimiter must not be alphanumeric or backslash

Here's my code:

preg_match('name="dsh" id="dsh" value="(.*?)"', 'name="dsh" id="dsh" value="123"', $matches);

+3

sed 07 Mar 12 at 13:23

2 answers

You need delimiters :

preg_match('/name="dsh" id="dsh" value="(.*?)"/', 'name="dsh" id="dsh" value="123"', $matches);

+1

Paulpro 07 Mar 12 at 13:24

Michael Berkowski · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-07T13:24:52+0000

You don't have a separator. Include the template in/

preg_match('/name="dsh" id="dsh" value="(.*?)"/', 'name="dsh" id="dsh" value="123"', $matches);

For templates that include /

themselves, it is recommended to use a different delimiter, for example ~

or #

to avoid escaping:

// Delimited with # instead of /
preg_match('#name="dsh" id="dsh" value="(.*?)"#', 'name="dsh" id="dsh" value="123"', $matches);