Regular expression syntax rules //Retrieval ->Match pattern
PCRE (Perl) compatible regular expression functions
POSIX extended regular expression functions
Regular expressions are a grammatical rule used to describe character arrangements and matching patterns. It is mainly used for pattern segmentation, matching, search and replacement operations of strings. The exact (text) matching we've used so far is also a regular expression.
In PHP, a regular expression is generally a programmatic description of a text pattern composed of regular characters and some special characters (similar to wildcards).