In what situations is it advisable to use regular expressions (RegEx) in PHP for text processing tasks, and how does it compare to using string manipulation functions for the same purpose?

Regular expressions (RegEx) are advisable to use in PHP for text processing tasks when you need to search for patterns within a string, validate input data, extract specific information, or manipulate text in a complex way. RegEx provides a powerful and flexible way to achieve these tasks compared to using string manipulation functions, which may become cumbersome and less efficient for complex pattern matching.

// Example: Using regular expressions to extract email addresses from a string
$string = "Contact us at email@example.com or support@example.com for assistance.";

$pattern = '/[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}/';
preg_match_all($pattern, $string, $matches);

print_r($matches[0]);