I wrote the following code (yes it does work) and was wondering why I don't need to escape the '<' and '>' characters inside the pattern since they are considered 'special' characters by the php manual.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-quote.php
var_dump(preg_match('/<[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9]*>/', "<html>", $matches));
echo "<pre>";
var_dump(htmlentities($matches[0]));
echo "</pre>";
output:
int(1)
string(12) "<html>"
Only the characters listed on this page need to be escaped in PHP regex matching/replacing.
While < and > can act as delimiter, it doesn't need to be escaped in the given example because you already have /(slash) acting as a delimiter.
Referring to the link in question
The
preg_quote()function may be used to escape a string for injection into a pattern and its optional second parameter may be used to specify the delimiter to be escaped.
< and > aren't meta characters is most contexts.
However they are used as such for:
(?P<name>)(?<=...)So that's why preg_quote plays it safe and escapes them. It's arguably redundant, since escaping ( and ? would be sufficient. But it doesn't hurt either.
