preg_replace - on nested items?

[bunner_bob]

I know this is simple for some of you, but (as usual) is hurting my tiny brain.

I have html stored in the db as html special characters. Most of it should be displayed unaltered, but actual html tags need to be un-converted so both the angle brackets (</>) and doublequotes (") are themselves, instead of html special characters.

I've got the angle brackets working fine:

preg_replace('/&lt;(\/?.+?)&gt;/s','<$1>', $string);

but what I want do is also convert every "[ampersand]quot;" between the angle brackets into " (double quote).

(sorry, have to write it that way or the board converts it to a doublequote)

So either I need to convert one first, then the other - e.g. 'make every [ampersand]quot; between < and > into "' (or, 'make every [ampersand]quot; between &lt; and &gt; into "') - or I need to modify the above preg_replace to have it replace the [ampersand]quot; at the same time.

I can't seem to wrap my brain around how to replace all instances of something that happen between two other somethings. Any advice?

Thanks,
Bob

[sidney]

try

html_entity_decode() ;

http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.html-entity-decode.php

[bunner_bob]

Ok - that does the conversion. But how do I limit that conversion so it only does substrings that begin with &lt; and end with &gt;? To me that says it's regexp time.

html_entity_decode will decode ALL specialchars, and I want to leave the rest of my text (that not between &lt; and &gt😉 alone.

It's a puzzler - at least for me.

• Bob