Question

I am having problems grabbing some text using preg_replace() in php. I am just trying to remove all text that starts with a http|https|www up until the first whitespace character. I am currently using:
(http|https|www)\S+
as my regex in preg_replace(). However I am getting this error when running the code:
Warning: preg_replace(): Unknown modifier ‘\’
I can use this same regex in a text editor, e.g. Sublime Text 2 with no problem. Any ideas why I am getting this error? Is there another way to grab the text I am looking for with a regex?

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

You must delimit your regular expressions. This is usually a slash (/), but can also be a pair of parentheses. After the second delimiter can follow a number of delimiters (multi-line regex, ignore white-space, case-insensitive, etc.). \ is not a valid modifier, and thus, PHP complains.

Modify your regex as follows:

preg_replace('/(http|https|www)\S+/', …, …);