<?php
$str = "Hello world. (can you hear me?)";
echo quotemeta($str);
?>
The output of the code above will be:
Hello world\. \(can you hear me\?\)
quotemeta
(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)
quotemeta — Quote meta characters
Description
Returns a version of str with a backslash character (\)
before every character that is among these:
. \ + * ? [ ^ ] ( $ )
Parameters
-
string -
The input string.
Return Values
Returns the string with meta characters quoted, or false if an empty
string is given as string.
Examples
Example #1 quotemeta() example
<?php
var_dump(quotemeta('PHP is a popular scripting language. Fast, flexible, and pragmatic.'));
?>The above example will output:
string(69) "PHP is a popular scripting language\. Fast, flexible, and pragmatic\."
Notes
Note: This function is binary-safe.
See Also
- addslashes() - Quote string with slashes
- addcslashes() - Quote string with slashes in a C style
- htmlentities() - Convert all applicable characters to HTML entities
- htmlspecialchars() - Convert special characters to HTML entities
- nl2br() - Inserts HTML line breaks before all newlines in a string
- stripslashes() - Un-quotes a quoted string
- stripcslashes() - Un-quote string quoted with addcslashes
- preg_quote() - Quote regular expression characters
add a note
User Contributed Notes 3 notes
kumarkulandai at gmail dot com ¶
15 years ago
George Adams ¶
18 years ago
Took me a while to realize this was NOT the command I wanted for escaping potentially harmful characters in a string that would be used as part of a system command. Instead, I needed either escapeshellarg() (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.escapeshellarg.php) or escapeshellcmd() (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.escapeshellcmd.php)
Anonymous ¶
23 years ago
This function escapes characters that have special meaning in regular expressions. preg_quote() <http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-quote.php> has similar functionality, but is more powerful since it escapes more characters (including one user-specified character).
