What are some common pitfalls when using regular expressions in PHP, specifically when trying to match specific patterns within a string?

One common pitfall when using regular expressions in PHP is forgetting to escape special characters within the pattern, which can lead to unexpected results or errors. To solve this, make sure to properly escape any special characters using backslashes (\) in the regular expression pattern. 

$string = "Hello, [World]!";
$pattern = "/\[.*?\]/"; // Escape the square brackets with backslashes

if (preg_match($pattern, $string, $matches)) {
    echo "Match found: " . $matches[0];
} else {
    echo "No match found.";
}

Keywords

regular expressions PHP patterns string matching pitfalls

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