The fourth use of backslash is for certain simple asser tions. An assertion specifies a condition that has to be met at a particular point in a match, without consuming any characters from the subject string. The use of subpatterns for more complicated assertions is described below. The backslashed assertions are

蛁 This function's behavior changed in 4.0.3. The temporary file is also created to avoid a race condition where the file might appear in the filesystem between the time the string was generated and before the the script gets around to creating the file. Note, that you need to remove the file in case you need it no more, it is not done automatically.