How can PHP developers optimize their regex patterns to efficiently extract email addresses from webpages while accounting for variations in formatting and whitespace?

When extracting email addresses from webpages using regex in PHP, developers can optimize their patterns by accounting for variations in formatting and whitespace. One way to do this is by using a regex pattern that allows for optional whitespace characters (\s*) before and after the "@" symbol, as well as within the domain part of the email address. Additionally, developers can use the "i" flag in their regex pattern to make the matching case-insensitive.

<?php
// Sample webpage content
$content = "Contact us at email@example.com or email @ example.com for more information.";

// Regex pattern to extract email addresses
$pattern = '/\b[A-Za-z0-9._%+-]+@\s*[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\s*\.[A-Z|a-z]{2,}\b/i';

// Match email addresses in the webpage content
preg_match_all($pattern, $content, $matches);

// Output the extracted email addresses
print_r($matches[0]);
?>