Help needed after updating PHP 5.3

Hi

After updating patch for PHP 5.3 I get errormessage

HP Deprecated: Function ereg() is deprecated in /includes/classes/db/mysql/query_factory.php on line 177
and line 139 and several other lines with ereg() and ereg_replace()

I have versiom 1.3.8 and have done all the security patches even though I did some of them after the PHP5.3 patch but have gone through the affected files to see that the changes were still there.

The shop seems to work but get these warnings if I turn errorlogging on. The way I noticed it was because I forgot to turn errorlogging off and my webserver got full of MYdebug.log files

should I change ereg() to preg_match() instead in affected files which I read here
http://docs.php.net/manual/en/migration53.deprecated.php

or do I not need to worry about the warnings?

Just patch it: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=140960
The error messages will be suppressed if properly patched, and thus will not trigger any failures.
Messages about "deprecated" calls can be safely ignored if the patch is in place.

Thanks DrByte, I appriciate your time.

But why does these warnings show up? Even though I can ignore them it would be intresting to know why.

Those messages show up because the PHP authors changed how many internal PHP functions work when they released PHP 5.3. They're trying to force a phasing-out of some components which they don't want to support anymore. Thus the messages in the cases where Zen Cart uses calls to functions the PHP people are trying to phase out.
The next version of Zen Cart will no longer use those functions. In the meantime, the patch suppresses the problem. There would have been almost hundreds of lines to fix, involving almost as many files, if the patch were to update every case. Instead of making you go through the pain of that, we opted for a simpler patch, since the patch is just that: a patch.