Sometimes you don't just want to cherry-pick the matches but need that the entire subject is made up from matching substrings, so every character of the subject is a member of a match. None of the existing preg_* function is easily applicable for this task, so I made the preg_match_entire() function.It uses the (*MARK) syntax which is documented here: https://pcre.org/original/doc/html/pcrepattern.html#SEC27<?php function preg_match_entire( string $pattern, string $subject, int $flags = 0 ){ $delimiter = $pattern[0]; $ldp = strrpos( $pattern, $delimiter ); $pattern = substr( $pattern, 1, $ldp - 1 ); $modifiers = substr( $pattern, $ldp + 1 ); $pattern = "{$delimiter} \G\z (*MARK:END) | \G (?:{$pattern}) {$delimiter}x{$modifiers}"; $r = preg_match_all( $pattern, $subject, $m, PREG_SET_ORDER | $flags ); if( $r === false ) return false; $end = array_pop( $m ); if( $end === null || ! isset( $end['MARK']) || $end['MARK'] !== 'END') return null; return $m; }test('#{\d+}#', ''); test('#{\d+}#', '{11}{22}{33}'); test('#{\d+}#', '{11}{}{aa}{22},{{33}}');function test( $pattern, $subject ){ echo "pattern: $pattern\n"; echo "subject: $subject\n"; print_matches('preg_match_entire: ', preg_match_entire( $pattern, $subject )); preg_match_all( $pattern, $subject, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER ); print_matches('preg_match_all: ', $matches ); echo "\n";}function print_matches( $t, $m ){ echo $t, is_array( $m ) && $m ? implode(',', array_column( $m, 0 )) : json_encode( $m ), "\n";} ?>