How can regular expressions be effectively used to extract specific information from a string in PHP?

Regular expressions can be effectively used in PHP to extract specific information from a string by defining a pattern that matches the desired information. This pattern can include specific characters, numbers, or words that you want to extract. By using functions like preg_match() or preg_match_all(), you can search a string for the defined pattern and retrieve the matched information.

$string = "Hello, my email is example@email.com";
$pattern = '/[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}/';
preg_match($pattern, $string, $matches);
$email = $matches[0];
echo $email; // Output: example@email.com