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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T01:49:25+00:00

In the latest phpmailer example file, there’s the following line: $body = eregi_replace([\],”,$body); As

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In the latest phpmailer example file, there’s the following line:

$body = eregi_replace("[\]",'',$body);

As I’m not really good in regular expressions, I can’t figure out what the above does and whether I need to use it when I write my own block of data ($body). Could anyone help me figure this out?

EDIT

I really copied it properly. Here is a whole chunk of code from the original phpmailer example file, completely untouched:

require_once('../class.phpmailer.php');

$mail             = new PHPMailer(); // defaults to using php "mail()"

$body             = file_get_contents('contents.html');
$body             = eregi_replace("[\]",'',$body);

$mail->AddReplyTo("name@yourdomain.com","First Last");

$mail->SetFrom('name@yourdomain.com', 'First Last');
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    That code is removing all backslashes from $body.

    Though it may look a little odd at first glance, the regex is correct. The backslash isn’t a metacharacter when it’s inside brackets in a POSIX regex.

    There’s all sorts of problems with this code anyway, though, especially since it’s supposed to be an example:

    • It uses one of the deprecated ereg (or POSIX) family of regex functions. Half-recent PHP examples should pretty much all be using the preg (Perl-compatible) family instead.
    • It uses case-insensitive matching (the i in eregi) even though it’s not matching against any letters, so case is irrelevant.

    • Most importantly, the actual purpose of the replacement is unclear. I can only guess that this is a misguided attempt to account for PHP’s magic quotes feature that automatically adds backslashes to all sorts of things.

      To be clear, this code is not a proper way to deal with magic quotes, since it will remove all backslashes from $body, even “real” ones present in the original input. The stripslashes() function is intended for exactly this use case. Or, since the example deals with reading from a file, you could simply turn off magic quotes.

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