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Comment by ojbyrne | Hacker News Reader

Actually, my understanding is that the p in preg actually stands for perl. php.net refers to PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions).

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Yes, and “Perl” has often been expanded as “Practical Extraction and Reporting Language” (I don't recall whether this is a half-joke or not, but I think it is).

If you like you can add the “compatible” though, which would conveniently add to the length.

$ perldoc perl

  NAME
       perl − Practical Extraction and Report Language

...

From Wikipedia: "There is some contention about the all-caps spelling "PERL", which the documentation declares incorrect[28] and which some core community members consider a sign of outsiders.[29] The name is occasionally backronymed as Practical Extraction and Report Language, which appears at the top of the documentation[27] and in some printed literature.[30]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name

Yes, I'm quite sure that is the actual meaning. Back in the day there was 'ereg' as well, but that has been deprecated for a long time I think. IIRC, in 1998-1999 it was a commonly asked question when to use preg_ or ereg_ functions.

But I guess the php docs themselves have caused people to think that the p stands for 'perform' - from the php docs 'preg_match - Perform a regular expression match.'. So yeah.

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