title: PHP string with special characters returns wrong answer
body: <p>I have these two lines in my code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$pattern = "/&lt;p class=\"prev [first]*\"&gt;&lt;a href=\"\/photography\/photo-of-the-day\/[^\/]+/";
  echo $pattern;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and the output is just:</p>
  
  <pre><code>/
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I even tried that like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$pattern = '/&lt;p class="prev [first]*"&gt;&lt;a href="\/photography\/photo-of-the-day\/[^\/]+/';
  echo $pattern;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but I got the same output.
  Where is the problem?</p>