Although I would consult the PHP developer minutes for a more direct source, here's a quote from that same article you linked to:

ereg

The ereg extension, which supports Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) regular expressions, is being removed from core PHP support.

EDIT: As for the direct source, here is a link to the PHP Developers Meeting minutes that summarizes changes.

    I don't think there was ever any intention to completely remove it. That would have caused way too much uproar for backwards compatibility. However, it may at some point become an optional extension that is not enabled by default. Also note that http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.regex.php states:

    Note: As of PHP 5.3.0 this extension is deprecated, calling any function provided by this extension will issue an E_DEPRECATED notice.

      NogDog wrote:

      That would have caused way too much uproar for backwards compatibility. However, it may at some point become an optional extension that is not enabled by default.

      There is still quite a lot of use of POSIX regex in many PHP-based applications today (including PEAR and PhpMyAdmin); in many cases it's been sitting there for ages without anyone bothering to fix it ('cos it ain't actually broken - except in cases where people have linked against a different library with different syntax).

      But since the bundled POSIX regex library is a fossil compared with PCRE, there's little enthusiasm for continuing to maintain it indefinitely. Hence the decision to make it a PECL extension for PHP 6: it'll be there for legacy support but out of the main stream of development (seeing as that where it effectively is already).

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