Can I store and call regex in variables for later use?

Question

I plan on storing regular expression codes in a database, but not sure how to get them from a variable to function.

Any advise?

$i = "([wx])([yz])" 
$j = "[^A-Za-z0-9]" 
$k= "([A-Z]{3}|[0-9]{4})"

    //Wold this execute properly, this really is the extent of my question? 
    preg_match($i, $string);

Answer 1

Regular expressions are simply strings, so you could store them as such in your database.