Quick PCRE Question

[james2010]

I'm building an expression to replace the first   in a group of spaces with a regular space " " followed by the same number of  .

This is what I have now

preg_replace("/ ( ?)*/is", " $1", $string);

it works fine when it's a one or two  , but if there are more than 2 it removes any additional ones. I'm not expert at regular expressions and I would greatly appreciate some help on this one. Thanks in advance.

[Weedpacket]

Replace the ? with a and drop the other (the one outside the color=red[/color]).

Oops, not quite. After that, put a pair of color=red[/color] around the second  , so that the * is applied to the whole entity (and not just the semicolon).

[james2010]

Alright I tried that, but didn't quite get the result I was looking for, apparently preg_replace was being greedy.

It seems to work when I add another ?

preg_replace("/ ( ??)*/is", " $1", $string);

[Weedpacket]

Funny; what I described would have got rid of the ? completely; and there would have been two sets of ().

preg_replace("/ (( )*)/is", " $1", $string);