How can the use of meta-characters in regular expressions impact the accuracy of text parsing in PHP?

Using meta-characters in regular expressions can impact the accuracy of text parsing in PHP because these special characters can be misinterpreted or cause unintended results. To ensure accurate text parsing, it is important to properly escape meta-characters that are meant to be treated as literal characters in the regular expression pattern. 

// Example code snippet to properly escape meta-characters in a regular expression pattern
$text = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.";
$pattern = "/quick brown fox/";
$escaped_pattern = preg_quote($pattern, '/');
if (preg_match($escaped_pattern, $text)) {
    echo "Pattern found in the text.";
} else {
    echo "Pattern not found in the text.";
}

Keywords

meta-characters regular expressions text parsing accuracy PHP

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