preg_match...not working...

[FatalError]

All right, so I'm making a template engine for my website, but I have a piece of code that's not matching anything...here it is:

preg_match_all("#<!-- BEGIN ([a-z0-9\-_\.]*?) -->(.*?)<!-- END ([a-z0-9\-_\.]*?) -->#", $tpl, $matches);

That's supposed to match <!-- BEGIN some_block_name -->Some HTML<!-- END some_block_name -->
However, it does not return anything...can someone give me an idea of what I did wrong?

[Weedpacket]

Well, . won't match a newline if you don't put an s modifier on the end. Could this be the problem?

Incidentally, seeing as you want the ending tag to match the starting tag, a backreference might be more reliable:

#<!-- BEGIN ([a-z0-9\-_\.]*?) -->(.*?)<!-- END \\1 -->#s

[FatalError]

Oh! Ok, thanks! I'm new to the PHP version of Regular Expressions, so I don't know any of the modifiers.

And you can use backreferences like that? All right, this will help a lot, because now I don't have to write additional code to make sure they match...thanks a lot!

[Weedpacket]

PHP uses the PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions) engine; so most of what is defined for Perl applies here (the differences are listed in the relevant section in PHP's manual).