Macros embedded in a string

[Capt_n_Hector]

Hi,

I want to start embedding macros in my webpages. Right now, my php script gets an article text string from MySQL and simply "echo"s it. I often want to put images in these articles, so I just write in the relevant html code as I 'm writing the article. BUT this is a bit cumbrsome, and I would like a much simpler way of doing this, using macros.

I want my script to take the string, look for my macro(s) (only one kind... for now), delimited by [[ and ]], get the string defined within those delimiters, break it up piece by piece, feed those pieces into a function, and finally use the output of that function to replace the entire macro before echoing the string.

For example, [[x|y|z]] would need to be found within a string, passed to a function, macro($x,$y,$z), and the output of macro() would replace [[x|y|z]].

Is there some simple way of doing this, or is it going to be as messy as I think it is?

Thanks!

[Capt_n_Hector]

Ok, I figured out a nice way to do this, in case anybody's interested:

First go through the article string with preg_replace_callback, looking for [[stuff]]. That's the exact function I'm looking for. It does a regular expression search, and replaces whatever it finds with a user-defined function.