RegEx

[silent]

I am using a regular expression (not PCRE -- ereg) for matching tags (I know you've probably heard this 1000 times, but I coudn't find it in the search)

Custom url tag in [] like this board uses.
The form is url=http:whatever]here is the code/url
(brackets are out)

[edit] I pasted the regex here, but because it had some characters that matched smileys here, it was all messed up[/edit]

The problem with this is that if there are more than one URL tags,
it messes up everything because I am allowing ANYTHING inside of the tag (including another URL tag!!!)

What is the format to exclude from the expression?

[onion2k]

Reply to this using the 'Disable smilies in this post' check box on the reply form (under the text area). We'll need to see the regexp in order to progress..

PS Woo.. 100 posts.

[poison]

the problem you probably ran over is that most quantifiers are 'greedy'...which means that they consume everything they can...you can 'tell' them to be lazy be suffixing them with a ? , ie: ?
a quick hack regex would be:

$test='url=http://whatever here is the code /url  '; // [] brackets REPLACED
$data=preg_replace('/\[\s*url\s*=\s*((?:ht|f)tps?\:\/\/[^\]\s]+)\s*\]([^\[]*?)\[\/url\]/smi', '<a href="$1">$2</a>', $test);
echo $data;

regards

[silent]

How would I do this with ereg?
Does ereg support that?

[poison]

donno...and also donno why you wanna use ereg because PCRE are more sophisticated, and a quote from the manual:
Note: preg_match(), which uses a Perl-compatible regular expression syntax, is often a faster alternative to ereg().

regards