What are the potential pitfalls of using regular expressions to extract specific words from a text in PHP?

Using regular expressions to extract specific words from a text in PHP can be error-prone if the regex pattern is not carefully crafted. It may not handle all edge cases or variations of the words you are trying to extract, leading to incorrect results. To mitigate this, it's recommended to thoroughly test the regex pattern with various inputs to ensure it captures all desired words accurately. 

$text = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
$word = "quick";

// Using word boundaries (\b) to match the specific word
$regex = "/\b" . preg_quote($word, '/') . "\b/i";

if (preg_match($regex, $text, $matches)) {
    echo "Found word: " . $matches[0];
} else {
    echo "Word not found";
}

Keywords

regular expressions text extraction PHP preg_match error handling

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