What are some common pitfalls when using regular expressions in PHP, especially for beginners?

One common pitfall when using regular expressions in PHP is not properly escaping special characters. To avoid this issue, you can use the preg_quote() function to escape any special characters before using them in your regular expression pattern. 

// Incorrect way without escaping special characters
$pattern = '/[a-z]+/';

// Correct way with escaping special characters
$pattern = '/'. preg_quote('[a-z]+', '/') .'/';

Keywords

regex PHP beginners common mistakes error handling

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