What are the potential pitfalls of using regex in PHP for pattern matching and replacement?

One potential pitfall of using regex in PHP for pattern matching and replacement is the risk of introducing vulnerabilities such as regex denial of service attacks. To mitigate this risk, it is important to limit the complexity of regex patterns and input strings to prevent excessive backtracking. Additionally, using built-in PHP functions like `preg_quote()` can help escape special characters in input strings before using them in regex patterns. 

$pattern = '/^' . preg_quote($input_string, '/') . '$/';
if (preg_match($pattern, $subject)) {
    // Perform replacement or other operations
}

Keywords

regex pattern matching replacement PHP functions error types

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