What I Learned Today: Regular Expression Backreferences

This is another post in my challenge to learn something new every day and then share that in a blog post.

This is fairly simple, but even though I'm comfortable with regular expressions, I was not familiar with the "?:" syntax (aka: question mark colon). I was working on some Behat tests using the MinkExtension, and this is used fairly often in the code (?P<option>(?:[^"]|\\")*).

The ?P<option> portion says to name the group enclosed by parenthesis "option", so in PHP in will be in the variable $option. The ?: portion says to not capture that group enclosed by parenthesis in a backreference. Besides being an optimization for the regular expression engine, it could be helpful to use this when doing a preg_match to only extract the groups that you want.