quotemeta

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

quotemetaQuote meta characters

Description

quotemeta(string $string): string

Returns a version of str with a backslash character (\) before every character that is among these:

. \ + * ? [ ^ ] ( $ )

Parameters

string

The input string.

Return Values

Returns the string with meta characters quoted, or false if an empty string is given as string.

Examples

Example #1 quotemeta() example

<?php

var_dump
(quotemeta('PHP is a popular scripting language. Fast, flexible, and pragmatic.'));
?>

The above example will output:

string(69) "PHP is a popular scripting language\. Fast, flexible, and pragmatic\."

Notes

Note: This function is binary-safe.

See Also

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User Contributed Notes 3 notes

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12
kumarkulandai at gmail dot com
14 years ago
<?php
$str
= "Hello world. (can you hear me?)";
echo
quotemeta($str);
?>

The output of the code above will be:
Hello world\. \(can you hear me\?\)
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8
George Adams
18 years ago
Took me a while to realize this was NOT the command I wanted for escaping potentially harmful characters in a string that would be used as part of a system command.  Instead, I needed either escapeshellarg() (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.escapeshellarg.php) or escapeshellcmd() (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.escapeshellcmd.php)
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4
Anonymous
22 years ago
This function escapes characters that have special meaning in regular expressions.  preg_quote() <http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-quote.php> has similar functionality, but is more powerful since it escapes more characters (including one user-specified character).
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