Good alternative to Eregi() in PHP

Question

I often find myself doing quick checks like this:

if (! eregi('.php',$fileName))
      $filename.='.php';

But sadly eregi() is going to be deprecated in PHP 6, which means all of my code that uses it will be rendered useless :(.

Is there another function that behaves exactly the same way as eregi()? I don't know anything about reg exps and don't want to learn, so preg_match() etc won't work for me.

Answer 1

stristr achieves exactly the same result as eregi (at least when you don't use regular expressions):

if (!stristr($fileName, '.php'))
    $filename.='.php';

You could also make a "fake" eregi this way:

if (!function_exists('eregi')) {
    function eregi($find, $str) {
        return stristr($str, $find);
    }
}

Update: Note that stristr doesn't accept regular expressions as eregi does, and for this specific case (checking the extension), you'd better go with vartec's solution.

Answer 2

Of course you are aware, that this doesn't do what you expect it do do? In regexp '.' means any character, so eregi('.php',$fileName) means filename with any character followed by 'php'. Thus for example "blabla2PHP.txt" will match your regexp.

Now what you want to do is this:

$file_ext = pathinfo($filename, PATHINFO_EXTENSION);
if(strtolower($file_ext) != 'php') 
   $filename .= '.php';

Answer 3

If you go for the "fake" eregi, you shold trigger a notice inside the fake function: trigger_error('Some code still use eregi',E_USER_NOTICE); This way you will easily catch the forgotten eregi calls and can replace them.

Answer 4

In this simple case you should be fine with the string manipulation functions as others have pointed out. However, if you do need regular expressions, "preg" funtions (Pearl compatible) such as preg_replace should be used instead of the "ereg" ones (POSIX).

Answer 5

Perhaps you should consider refactoring your code to do this instead:

if (substr($fileName, -4, 4) !== '.php')
    $fileName .= '.php';

As stated in other answers to this question, eregi('.php') will search for anything followed by 'php' ANYWERE in the file (not just at the end).

Answer 6

I generally create and endsWith function; or other simple string manipulation functions for this kind of stuff.

function endsWith($string, $end){
    return substr($string, -strlen($end)) == $end;
}

Answer 7

stristr i used in install to script file to remove problem and its working....... thanks for this advice.

Answer 8

Try this, I'm using this quite a lot since I updated to PHP 6 recently.

Previously:

if(eregi('-', $_GET['id'])
{
   return true;
}

Now I'm using this - it works just as good.

if(preg_match('/(.+)-(.+)/', $_GET['id'])) {
{
   return true;
}

Just replace your code with the following, and you shouldn't have any hitch of difference within your code. If you're wondering why PHP remove eregi() it's because of the performance issues it has when used a lot, so it's better to use preg_match() as it's more specific in searching so it has better performance and rendering times.

Let me know how this works for you.