What are some common challenges beginners face when using regular expressions in PHP?

One common challenge beginners face when using regular expressions in PHP is not escaping special characters properly. This can lead to unexpected results or errors in the regex pattern. To solve this issue, it's important to use the preg_quote() function to escape special characters before using them in the regex pattern.

$pattern = '/^Hello, world\!$/';
$escaped_pattern = preg_quote($pattern, '/');