Blog archives

Escaping dollar signs in PHP regular expressions

I had some problems matching dollar signs in PHP regexp’s:

$str = 'Bacon $ham eggs and $spam';
preg_match_all("|$|", $str, $matches);
print_r($matches);

Gives

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] =>
        )
)

It does work when double escaping the $

preg_match_all("|\$|", $str, $matches);

Gives

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => $
            [1] => $
        )

)

This problem occurs because PHP substitutes $variables in strings enclosed in “double quotes”. So, actually the problem can very easily be solved by just replacing double with single quotes:

preg_match_all('|$' $str, $matches);

Add a comment