How can regular expressions be used to find and manipulate specific patterns within a string in PHP?

Regular expressions can be used in PHP to search for specific patterns within a string and manipulate them as needed. To use regular expressions in PHP, you can use functions like preg_match(), preg_match_all(), preg_replace(), or preg_split(). These functions allow you to search for patterns using regular expressions and perform actions such as matching, replacing, or splitting strings based on the patterns found.

$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;