PHP's preg_replace() function is not replacing all lines

Question

PHP's preg_replace() function is not replacing all lines in:

12*some input
12*some input
1*some input

The code is:

preg_replace("/^(\d{1,2}[^0-9])/", "", $text);

The result is:

some input
12*some input
1*some input

But I want this:

some input
some input
some input

Answer 1

Depending on how the implementation of PHP does it, I think you're missing either an option or your regex doesn't do what you think it does.

/^(\d{1,2}[^0-9])/

The above regex would look for 1-2 numbers followed not by numbers from the start of the string. Depending on how it works a line break doesn't indicate that ^ should match again.

If you look at the PCRE Pattern Modifiers in the manual you likely need to supply the m flag to turn on multi line mode.

In addition, though it's missing from that manual page, you might need the global flag. So the above regex would become:

/^(\d{1,2}[^0-9])/gm

You might also be able to test this regular expression on platforms like RegEx 101.