What considerations should be made when using regular expressions in PHP functions to manipulate HTML code, especially in terms of efficiency and accuracy?

When using regular expressions in PHP functions to manipulate HTML code, it is important to consider the efficiency and accuracy of the regex patterns. Inefficient or inaccurate patterns can lead to unexpected results or performance issues. It is recommended to carefully test the regex patterns with different HTML structures to ensure they work correctly in various scenarios. 

// Example of using regular expressions to extract all href attributes from anchor tags in HTML code
$html = '<a href="https://example.com">Link 1</a><a href="https://example2.com">Link 2</a>';

preg_match_all('/<a\s[^>]*href=(["\'])(.*?)\1/', $html, $matches);

$links = $matches[2];

print_r($links);

Keywords

Regular expressions PHP functions HTML code efficiency accuracy

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