Escaped Backslash Characters in PHP Single Quoted Strings

Question

I took these sentences from the PHP manual:

\'this is a simple string\',
\'Arnold once said: \"I\\\'ll be back\"\',
\'You deleted C:\\\\*.*?\',
\'You deleted         


        

Answer 1

Instead of meddling with preg_replace(), consider using var_export() to print a "true copy" of the string:

foreach ($strings as $s) {
    echo var_export($s, true), PHP_EOL;
}

Output:

'this is a simple string'
'Arnold once said: "I\'ll be back"'
'You deleted C:\\*.*?'
'You deleted C:\\*.*?'
'This will not expand: \\n a newline'
'Variables do not $expand $either'

As you can see, sentence 3 and 4 are identical to PHP.