PHP Manual
PCRE
Predefined Constants

Predefined Constants

The constants below are defined by this extension, and will only be available when the extension has either been compiled into PHP or dynamically loaded at runtime.

**PREG constants**
Constants	Description	As of
`PREG_PATTERN_ORDER`	Orders results so that `$matches[0]` is an array of full pattern matches, `$matches[1]` is an array of strings matched by the first parenthesized subpattern, and so on. This flag is only used with preg_match_all().
`PREG_SET_ORDER`	Orders results so that `$matches[0]` is an array of first set of matches, `$matches[1]` is an array of second set of matches, and so on. This flag is only used with preg_match_all().
`PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE`	See the description of `PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE`.
`PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY`	This flag tells preg_split() to return only non-empty pieces.
`PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE`	This flag tells preg_split() to capture parenthesized expression in the delimiter pattern as well.
`PREG_SPLIT_OFFSET_CAPTURE`	If this flag is set, for every occurring match the appendant string offset will also be returned. Note that this changes the return values in an array where every element is an array consisting of the matched string at offset 0 and its string offset within subject at offset 1. This flag is only used for preg_split().
`PREG_UNMATCHED_AS_NULL`	This flag tells preg_match() and preg_match_all() to include unmatched subpatterns in `$matches` as `null` values. Without this flag, unmatched subpatterns are reported as empty strings, as if they were empty matches. Setting this flag allows to distinguish between these two cases.	7.2.0
`PREG_NO_ERROR`	Returned by preg_last_error() if there were no errors.	5.2.0
`PREG_INTERNAL_ERROR`	Returned by preg_last_error() if there was an internal PCRE error.	5.2.0
`PREG_BACKTRACK_LIMIT_ERROR`	Returned by preg_last_error() if backtrack limit was exhausted.	5.2.0
`PREG_RECURSION_LIMIT_ERROR`	Returned by preg_last_error() if recursion limit was exhausted.	5.2.0
`PREG_BAD_UTF8_ERROR`	Returned by preg_last_error() if the last error was caused by malformed UTF-8 data (only when running a regex in UTF-8 mode).	5.2.0
`PREG_BAD_UTF8_OFFSET_ERROR`	Returned by preg_last_error() if the offset didn't correspond to the begin of a valid UTF-8 code point (only when running a regex in UTF-8 mode).	5.3.0
`PREG_JIT_STACKLIMIT_ERROR`	Returned by preg_last_error() if the last PCRE function failed due to limited JIT stack space.	7.0.0
`PCRE_VERSION`	PCRE version and release date (e.g. "`7.0 18-Dec-2006`").	5.2.4