Regular Expression question

[rayearth]

Hi there

I'm trying to write a regular expression to match a string that isn't part of a link. For example, if I want to match the string "red" and I have the following to haystack:

red is <a href=red.html>fred's</a> friend

Only the red at the beginning of the line should match since the red in "red.html" and the red in "fred's" are part of a link.

I've tried playing around with assertions using preg_replace (I'm trying to replace the matched text with something else), but haven't had much success - never really got the hang on regular expressions.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

[maniac1aw]

you could run striptags to get an HTML free version of your text.. then run a regex on that

[rayearth]

Thanks for your reply maniac1aw,

I think you misunderstood what I had to do. I have to find and replace a certain string that is not part of a link from a bunch of text. BUT I still need to have the links intact at the end of the day - I do not want to take them out. From my understanding, using strip_tags will remove all the links (and other tags) hence isn't a solution ~_~