title: @ (at) symbols preg_replace function
body: <p>Is the "@" symbol sometimes used to surround a PHP regular expression? I'm working with a code base and found this function call:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$content = preg_replace("@(&lt;/?[^&gt;]*&gt;)+@", "", $content);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I believe it's removing all XML tags from the string but I'm not sure what the "@" symbol in there means.</p>