What are the potential pitfalls of using ereg_replace for string replacements in PHP?

The potential pitfalls of using ereg_replace for string replacements in PHP include deprecated functionality, as ereg functions have been deprecated as of PHP 5.3.0 and removed in PHP 7.0.0. To solve this issue, it is recommended to use the preg_replace function instead, which provides similar functionality but uses Perl-compatible regular expressions.

// Using preg_replace instead of ereg_replace for string replacements
$new_string = preg_replace('/pattern/', 'replacement', $old_string);