What are the potential drawbacks of using regular expressions for simple substring searches in PHP?

Using regular expressions for simple substring searches in PHP can be overkill and may result in slower performance compared to using built-in string functions like strpos or strstr. Additionally, regular expressions can be harder to read and understand for developers who are not familiar with them. To address this issue, it is recommended to use simpler string functions when performing basic substring searches. 

// Using strpos for simple substring search
$string = "Hello, world!";
$search = "world";
if(strpos($string, $search) !== false) {
    echo "Substring found!";
} else {
    echo "Substring not found.";
}

Keywords

regular expressions substring searches drawbacks PHP error types

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