Re: Regular expression newbie question, convert this: [::word1 \" word2 \" word3::] to : ".word1 " word2 " word3."

hi, i was developing an application that will read in the content of a html file. and within this html file contains php variables which will be replaced using the eval() function with its required value. and within this html, i want to be able to run php functions. however, due to the fact that characters need to be escaped so that eval() can process it, i have to make use of addslashes() to escape all " that are embedded in the html file. with the " escaped, eval() will be able to work and evaluate the php variable and instead of: eval("\$rs = \"<span class="normal">$phpVar</span>\";"); (won't work) it will now be: eval("\$rs = \"<span class=\"normal\">$phpVar</span>\";"); (work) and to call a date() function on the above text, this format will work: eval("\$rs = \"<span class=\"normal\">".date("m d y")."$phpVar</span>\";"); since the text that is passed into eval() came from a html/php/inc (whatever you name it) file, there is no way you will know that a particular text is in fact a php function. so i thought of prefixing and suffixing php function with [::date("m d y")::] and it will be helpful in the sense that the application will know that oh, this is a php function, i need to ". ." it so that eval will not throw me an error. with that, now the html file's content will be something like: <span class="normal">[::date("m d y",$phpVar)::]</span> after using addslashes(), it will be: <span class=\"normal\">[::date(\"m d y\",$phpVar)::]</span> for the above text, in order for eval() to parse correctly, it has to be in this format: eval("\$rs = \"<span class=\"normal\">".date("m d y",$phpVar)."</span>\";") and there is always a chance that the html text could contain more than 1 block of [:: phpfunction ::] thats why i came up with that piece of code to convert the text to a string that eval will be able to understand. and at the end of it, i will be echoing $rs to display the final result. you probably will wonder why dont i use include() and require()? that way, php will be handling all the above without requiring additional work. however, due to the way the result has to be handled, i couldn't use include nor require. lance