PHP preg_match: escaping { and }

Question

Hello. I am facing a little problem. My string is From {start} to {end} and I want to validate it using preg_match() to avoid illegal chars.

preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z\{\} ]{1,}$/",$var)

The point is the escape for { and }.

thanks :)

Answer 1

You don't need to escape curly braces inside the square brackets:

preg_match('!^[a-zA-Z{} ]+$!', $var);

If you need to escape characters, just put a backslash (\) before them. Note: if you're using a double quoted string, you may need to escape the backslashes from interpretation there. For example:

• '\t' matches a tab character;
• "\t" is a tab character; and
• "\\t" is equivalent to '\t'.