What are best practices for working with non-capturing groups?

Non-capturing groups are a powerful feature in regular expressions, allowing you to group patterns without creating a backreference for that group. This can improve performance and readability in many regex scenarios.

Best Practices for Working with Non-Capturing Groups

  • Use non-capturing groups when the grouped portion of the regex is not needed later in the match.
  • Prefer non-capturing groups over capturing groups when you want to simplify regex and avoid unnecessary memory usage.
  • Utilize non-capturing groups to make complex patterns more understandable by clearly defining sections of the regex without cluttering capture indexes.

Example

$pattern = '/(?:abc|def)(\d+)/'; preg_match($pattern, 'abcdef123', $matches); // $matches[1] will contain '123'

non-capturing groups regex best practices Perl regex regular expressions pattern matching

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