preg_* functions not working as expected (as in perl) 4.0.6

Hi ! I found that following regular expression patern: /('(([^']*\\')*)([^']*)')/s works in Perl, but doesn't in PHP. It is trying to find sting with ' char escaped, like 'It wasn\'t so good' You may test it with following scripts : #!/usr/bin/perl while (<>) { print ">$1<\n" while /('(([^']*\\')*)([^']*)')/gs } while such code in PHP 4.0.6: <?php $s_test = " 'abc \' aaa' sfds' ' sdfsdfsdfsd' "; $s_re = <<< EOT /('(([^']*\\')*)([^']*)')/s EOT; if (preg_match($s_re, $s_test, $as_result)) { print_r($as_result); } else echo "expression not found\n";} will return You ALL the string $s_test between first occurence of ' char and the last occurence. I've been told on #php at irc.php.net that perl regexp handling code is a part of PHP source and so this effect is not related to bugs of some external library. Is there anything I can do about it ? I wanted to create PHP shell script that parses other scripts looking onto their code structure and fetching some info from it. Further I want to properly parse strings like: 'some \\\' single\n\' string' which seems to be just impossible to be done today. And I really wouldn't like to switch to Perl. Is there any hope ? :-) Waiting for Your answers. Grzegorz Prokopski System: Debian Potato with some addons from Woody (but nothing so significant that could affect results - I think)