What common difficulties do users face when working with regular expressions in PHP?

One common difficulty users face when working with regular expressions in PHP is escaping special characters. Special characters like backslashes (\) and dollar signs ($) have special meanings in regular expressions and need to be escaped with another backslash. To solve this issue, users can use PHP's built-in function preg_quote() to automatically escape special characters in a given string.

$pattern = '/^(\d+)\.\d{2}$/'; // Regular expression pattern
$escaped_pattern = preg_quote($pattern, '/'); // Escaping special characters in the pattern