On Saturday, 29 June 2024 at 22:23, mickmackusa <[email protected]> wrote:
>> If one can easily use a function incorrectly in a way that is not
>> *immediately* apparent, then I consider the function to be badly
>> designed.
>
> Does that philosophy also cover preg_quote()? I've lost count of the number of times that
> I've seen it used in Stack Overflow answers without a second parameter (including
> array_map('preg_quote', $array)) and its returned value used in a regex that has foward
> slashes as delimiters.
>
> Additionally, it is an unintuitively named function; it doesn't actually "quote"
> anything -- it \e\s\c\a\p\e\s characters. This makes life unnecessarily harder for devs who are new
> to PHP who need to find the regex escaping function.
>
> Would it be reasonable to create preg_escape() which also (sometimes unnecessrily)
> includes the (de facto default delimiter) forward slash in its default list of escaped characters so
> that preg_quote() could eventually be deprecated? As far as I know this would do no harm, will
> prevent holes in code, and make PHP more intuitive.
It would possibly be reasonable, but this is a seperate discussion to this.
Arguably a lot of functions/methods named "quote" do escaping, so this feels like a more
general problem than just ext/pcre.
Moreover, I really don't think people use a forward slash as a defacto default delimiter, I
have always use # as this is what the first tutorial about regexes that I read used.
Best regards,
Gina P. Banyard
>