PHP regex delimiters, / vs. | vs. {} , what are the differences?

Question

In the PHP manual of PCRE, http://us.php.net/manual/en/pcre.examples.php , it gives 4 examples of valid patterns:

• /<\\/\\w+>/
• |(\\d{3})-\\d+|Sm
• /^(?i)php[34]/
• {^\\s+(\\s+)?$}

Seems that / , | or a pair of curly braces can use as delimiters, so is there any difference between them?

Answer 1

No difference, except the closing delimiter cannot appear without escaping.

This is useful when the standard delimiter is used a lot, eg instead of

preg_match("/^http:\\/\\/.+/", $str);

you can write

preg_match("[^http://.+]", $str);

to avoid needing to escape the / .

Answer 2

In fact you can use any non alphanumeric delimiter (excluding whitespaces and backslashes)

"%^[a-z]%"

works as well as

"*^[a-z]*"

as well as

"!^[a-z]!"