Stupid Regular Expressions.

[Anon]

Okay, I'm writing a news system. I'm attempting to add in special tags so that people won't have to use HTML directly (I want to remove HTML). So I'm using a bunch of RegExp's to replace the tags.

Example: Testing
Goal: To get Testing to be displayed in bold.

I tried this first. $story is the variable that contains the news story.

$story = ereg_replace("^{[b]([([b])])[/b]$",} "<b>\1</b>", $story);

That did nothing, so then I tried this.

$story = ereg_replace("^{[b](.*)[/b]$",} "<b>\1</b>", $story);

Once again, nothing. Finally I tried this, even though I didn't think it would work.

$story = ereg_replace("^b[/b]$", "<b>\1</b>", $story);

None of these regular expressions have worked. So what's wrong with them?

[Anon]

...

[Anon]

I think the problem is with your '^' and '$' characters. Those tell the regexps that it should match the start and end of a string, but if your string is "dsadsa dsa dsad", and are not at the beginning nor end, so it won't match.

Diego

[Anon]

In perl REGEXPs [ is a special character, there you need to escape it if you want to use it a normal character and not character class definition.
Have you trieded the same with preg_replace?