Why do PHP regexes have the surrounding delimiters? It seems like it would be more clear if any pattern modifiers were passed in as a parameter to whatever function was being used.
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Why do PHP regexes have the surrounding delimiters? It seems like it would be more clear if any pattern modifiers were passed in as a parameter to whatever function was being used.
There is no technical reason why it has to be like this.
As noted in a comment, the underlying library does not require that flags be passed as part of the regexp – in fact, the extension has to strip these off and pass them as a separate argument.
It appears as though the original implementer was trying to make it look like grep/sed/awk/perl/etc so that it is more familiar to programmers coming from those tools.