In the context of PHP development, how important is it to capture and retain additional information like the presence of "EX:" before a date while parsing a string for specific data?

It is important to capture and retain additional information like the presence of "EX:" before a date while parsing a string for specific data because it can provide context or additional details that may be needed for further processing. To solve this issue, you can use regular expressions to match and capture the "EX:" prefix along with the date value from the input string.

$inputString = "EX: 2021-10-15";
$pattern = "/(EX: )?(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/";
preg_match($pattern, $inputString, $matches);

$hasPrefix = $matches[1] ?? false;
$date = $matches[2];

echo "Prefix: " . ($hasPrefix ? $hasPrefix : "N/A") . PHP_EOL;
echo "Date: " . $date;