Regular Express Won't Accept <? or ?>

bombski

I'm trying to create a code similar to BBCode. I found the function on the web and now need to add in php tags.

Here is my code

<?php

function bbcode($messagetext) { 

$search = array('#<a href="http://([a-z]+?://){1}(.*?)\" target="_blank">([a-z]+?://){1}(.*?)</a>#', '#[url](.*?)[/url]#', '#<a href="http://([a-z" target="_blank">+?://){1}(.*?)](.*?)</a>#', '#(.*?)#', '#(.*?)#', '#(.*?)#', '#[img]([a-z]+?://){1}(.*?)[/img]#', '#[img](.*?)[/img]#', '#[phptag](.*?)[/phptag]#'); 

$replace = array('<a href="12">$1$2</a>', '<a href=http://12>1</a>', '<a href="12">3</a>', '<b>1</b>', '<i>1</i>', '<u>1</u>', '<img src="12">', '<img src="12" />', highlight_string('1') ); 

$messagetext = preg_replace($search, $replace, $messagetext); 

return $messagetext; 

}

print nl2br(bbcode($myText));

?>

For some reason it doesn't print anything out if I include the <?php or <? and if I end it with ?> it doesn't print anything. Where am I going wrong.

Also the text that is within the php tags should then use the function highlight_string but I can't get this to work either.

Thank you

dave420

'?' is a special character in regular expressions. Escape it if you're going to use it in a pattern (precede it by a '\').

Also, you might want to try using a pattern like this:

/[([A-Za-z\w]+)](.*)[\/\1]/Us

which will match [something]middle bit[/something]. You can then loop through all the matches to determine the contents of the tag and act accordingly. That way, to support a new tag, you don't have to change the patterns, just add a new handler.