What is the significance of the caret (^) in negating character classes in PHP regular expressions?

In PHP regular expressions, the caret (^) symbol is used to negate character classes, meaning it will match any character that is not specified within the brackets. To negate a character class, simply place the caret (^) symbol at the beginning of the brackets. This can be useful when you want to match any character except those specified in the character class. Example: To match any character except vowels (a, e, i, o, u), you can use the following regular expression: 

$string = "Hello World";
$pattern = '/[^aeiou]/i'; // Match any character except vowels
preg_match_all($pattern, $string, $matches);
print_r($matches[0]); // Output: Array ( [0] => H [1] => l [2] => l [3] =>   [4] => W [5] => r [6] => l [7] => d )

Keywords

caret negating character classes PHP regular expressions

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