What best practices should be followed when creating regular expressions in PHP for parsing specific patterns within text data?

When creating regular expressions in PHP for parsing specific patterns within text data, it is important to follow best practices to ensure efficiency and accuracy. This includes using anchors (^ and $) to match the beginning and end of a line, escaping special characters with a backslash (\), using quantifiers (+, *, ?) appropriately, and utilizing capturing groups () to extract specific parts of the matched text. 

$text = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
$pattern = '/\b\w{5}\b/'; // Match 5-letter words
preg_match_all($pattern, $text, $matches);
print_r($matches[0]);

Keywords

Regular expressions PHP parsing patterns text data

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