Within PHP there are seven functions used for searching strings using POSIX-style regular expressions: • ereg () - This function utilizes the POSIX-style regular expressions to search strings provided for a match and is case-sensitive. If there is a match, the function returns a TRUE, if the regular expression does not find a match, a FALSE is returned. <?php $phone_number = "1900Atlanta"; if (ereg("[^0-9]",$phone_number)) print "The Phone Number must contain only numeric digits"; ?> The result of the above php script, which tests for any characters in the $phone_number variable that are not numeric digits, would be the printing of "The Phone Number must contain only numeric digits". Another way to use the ereg() function is to utilize the optional parameter regs (the third parameter) to break up a string. The following demonstrates how this would work: <?php $phone_number = "515-435-6789"; $
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