For the past eight years PHP has recommended using the PCRE regex functions. This has been noted on, for example, the manual page for ereg().

recommended?

simply not true

all it ever says is "Note: preg_match(), which uses a Perl-compatible regular expression syntax, is often a faster alternative to ereg(). "

plus, posix regex have a life of their own, independent of php

at my engineering firm we use posix regex exclusively

php is making a mistake abandoning parts of its api.

a mistake.

The api is still usable as it is emulated by pcre. If you really like to use it for the rest of your life, disable the deprecated warnings and be done with that.

you've missed the point entirely

unlike C and Java etc

php has gone the route of "most of your old scripts will no longer work when you upgrade php"

it's a mistake

there is no point in trying to defend it, it's a known mistake that's made many of us upset

for example, i teach php at a university and at a college, in addition to being a contractor and developing my own sites such as torqueinvoicing.com and we all know it's a mistake

You completely ignore the options you have, that's your rights. There is no bug, there is no issue > bogus. If you don't know how to use the error_reporting flags, please read the manual or ask for support in one of the numerous support channels.

Thanks for your understanding.

No, you think it's a mistake. In fact, the PCRE library offers more features, (mostly) better performance and is used in other programming languages as well (Java, Javascript, .NET). On top of that, it offers more consistent syntax.

After all, no one is forcing you to upgrade your PHP version. It will remain available throughout the 5.x versions. Just don't update to PHP 6 if it really is a problem. Either way, you've got more than enough time to update any scripts or sites.

you are mistaken again

posix regex are ALSO everywhere!

i have written probably 10000 scripts, i won't be updating them to use your favorite version of regex

you have once again missed the point:

do not throw away support for APIs

YOU keep the regex, and let US choose

that's community-driven, open-source software

trust me on this

i need to talk to someone more senior/experienced

i write 5000 - 10000 php scripts a year, most of which use posix regex

and i don't need a junior telling me "we are not forcing you to upgrade to php 5.3; keep 5.2 forever"

only a newbie would say that

my clients' scripts are on 1000s of servers around the world

php could also remove support for the pow() function, since there are alternative ways of raising numbers to powers, but like the ereg() support, they'd f*ck millions of developer worldwide

in short:
keep ereg() == no problems
scrap ereg() == problems

so why scrap API support?

Jay, disable E_DEPRECATED and be happy. Now go back to your usual activities, thanks.

i can't

see, "marked for deprecation" is different than "will no longer be supported in 5.3"

i'm helping php avoid big mistakes

nobody answered the original query

WHY stop supporting parts of the api all of a sudden?

it does NO harm leaving it in, as in ZERO 

it DOES harm taking it out

Can you please do your homework prior to post to php.net's bug reports?

Using PHP 5.3.0/svn:

> php -r "error_reporting(E_ALL); ereg('POSIX');"

Deprecated: Function ereg() is deprecated in Command line code on line 1

> php -r "error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_DEPRECATED); ereg('POSIX', 'foo');"

you first

This function has been DEPRECATED as of PHP 5.3.0 and REMOVED as of PHP 6.0.0. Relying on this feature is highly discouraged.

It won't be available in php6 because ereg does not work with Unicode. Simple. Has PHP6 been released yet? or is it getting anywhere close to be released? No and no.

And php 5.x still has many years to live, given that you had already almost a decade to be ready and that you get 5 more years or so using error_reporting.... EOD.

then make ereg() work with preg_match()

so our code is not garbage

when php6 comes out, millions of servers get upgraded, and millions of scripts will no longer function.

a mistake

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We did not write the regex implementation.  We rely on 3rd-party libraries for everything in PHP.  If a POSIX-compatible library that supports Unicode magically appears, we can consider it, but as of right now that does not exist and we are not going to write one.  I doubt any of the other scripting languages are going to do that either.  Python and Ruby both rely on PCRE as well, so we all support the same type of regular expressions.  

The responsible thing for us to do, given the state of regex libraries, is to let users know that Unicode is the future and their current POSIX regular expressions is not going to work in this Unicode world and they need to plan for that.

I am sorry you do not agree with that, but that is the state of things currently.

ok thank you

it's troublesome for many of us, but unavoidable i guess