Question

I’ve just installed a website & legacy CMS onto our server and I’m getting a POSIX compilation error. Luckily it’s only appearing in the backend however the client’s keen to get rid of it.

Warning: preg_match_all() [function.preg-match-all]: Compilation failed: 
POSIX collating elements are not supported at offset 32 in
/home/kwecars/public_html/webEdition/we/include/we_classes/SEEM/we_SEEM.class.php
on line 621

From what I can tell it’s the newer version of PHP causing the issue. Here’s the code:

function getAllHrefs($code){

$trenner = "[\040|\n|\t|\r]*";

$pattern = "/<(a".$trenner."[^>]+href".$trenner."[=\"|=\'|=\\\\|=]*".$trenner.")
([^\'\">\040? \\\]*)([^\"\' \040\\\\>]*)(".$trenner."[^>]*)>/sie";

preg_match_all($pattern, $code, $allLinks); // ---- line 621
return $allLinks;

}

How can I tweak this to work on the newer version of php on this server?

Thanks in advance, my voodoo just isn’t strong enough 😉

Answer 1

[...] are character classes, they match any character between the brackets, you don’t have to add | between them. See character classes.

So [abcd] will match a or b or c or d.

If you want to match alternations of more than one character, for example red or blue or yellow, use a sub pattern:

"(red|blue|yellow)"

And you guessed, [abcd] is equivalent to (a|b|c|d).

---

So here is what you could do for your regex:

For

$trenner = "[\040|\n|\t|\r]*";

Write this instead:

$trenner = "[\040\n\t\r]*";

And for

"[=\"|=\'|=\\\\|=]"

You could do

"(=\"|=\'|=\\\\|=)"

Or

"=[\"'\\\\]?"

BTW you could use \s instead of $trenner (see http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.escape.php)