regex problems..

[Anon]

hi, i'm using preg split to split information into an array, but i want to use a special escape character so people can type * (* is my seperator) to make php ignore it, but i'm having problems figuring out the regular expression, i'm using pcre.

[Anon]

Hm. I wouldn't want to try this without PCRE regexps...

I think a lookbehind negative assertion might do the trick. See the manual for its info on PCRE pattern syntax for details - it's too hairy to paraphrase here; but as it says "(?<!foo)bar" matches any occurrence of "bar" not immediately precededed by "foo".

Lessee, we need to escape the escape character so..., that would make it

$array = preg_split('/(?<!\)"/', $string);

Note that the \ remains, I guess you'd want to $array = str_replace('\"','"',$array); as well.

[Anon]

hey thanx, worked like a charm