What do you think about adding another option to preg_match() to allow the
$offset parameter to be treated as the start anchor?
The manual proposes to do this:
$subject = "abcdef";
$pattern = '/^def/';
$offset = 3;
preg_match($pattern, substr($subject, $offset), $matches);
In other words, use substr() to copy the entire remainder of the string.
I just wrote a simple SQL parser tonight, and had to use this approach,
which (I imagine) must be pretty inefficient?
I'd like to be able to do the following:
$subject = "abcdef";
$pattern = '/^def/';
$offset = 3;
preg_match($pattern, $subject, $matches, PREG_ANCHOR_OFFSET, $offset);
This new option would make the ^ anchor work from the given $offset, which
allows me to parse the entire $subject without copying anything.
Thoughts?
