Storing a Regex String in a Variable

[pilhofer]

This seems like such a simple thing, but it just isn't working for me... I have a series of regexes, and rather than writing them out each time, I wanted to store each one in a variable, and then insert it into the appriate spot in the code at runtime, but I just can't get it to work.

I've tried all kinds of variations, including:

preg_match("/" . $regex_string . "/i", $first_pt, $match)

But none works.

One clue might be the following: When I step through execution, and load my regex string, it seems to escape all my special characters (e.g., \s becomes \s).

Anyone have a clue what the problem is and/or how I can make this work?

[non_zero]

the preg_match function seems to replace the special characters of the subject string. one solutions is: don't use special characters.

this works:
$regex_string = "blah\sblah";
preg_match("/" . $regex_string . "/i", "blah blah", $match);

this does not work:
$regex_string = "blah\sblah";
preg_match("/" . $regex_string . "/i", "blah\sblah", $match);