preg_replace(): Compilation failed

Question

Is anyone here who can help me with this? the pattern is

/\[url=?\]([a-z0-9:\.\\\/-\s]*?)\[\/url\]/isS

The error:

preg_replace(): Compilation failed: invalid range in character class at offset 26

Answer 1

Escape minus (-)

 /\[url=?\]([a-z0-9:\.\\\/\-\s]*?)\[\/url\]/is

Demo

Answer 2

This should work in PHP (PCRE):

/\[url=?\]([a-z0-9:\.\\\/\-\s]*?)\[\/url\]/is

First of all escape the - in your character class statement [] otherwise you get a wrong range error.

Second the /S modifier is probably not a good idea with your pattern. Read:

When a pattern is going to be used several times, it is worth spending more time analyzing it in order to speed up the time taken for matching. If this modifier is set, then this extra analysis is performed. At present, studying a pattern is useful only for non-anchored patterns that do not have a single fixed starting character.

Source

To test your regular expressions regex101.com is quite good.