An if statment that someone else designed and I can't parse ;(

Hello all, This may not be the best place to post this question, but I don't know where else to ask it, so here it goes. I have a program that someone was helping me to build and one of the functions returns a string similar to this: "%if%(%value%)?(%value% Minutes):\"WAH!\"%if%" I don't have any control on the string that is spits out and I can't edit the program that was built (because the person that I was working with got in a bad accident and is basically a vegetable now) but I have to break it out into an array similar to this: array { 1 => if 2 => value 3 => ( 4 => value 5 => Minutes) 6 => "WAH!" 7 => if } I had a regex working for it, but it broke, maybe I have the syntax for the regex wrong or something, here is the regex: $RegExPattern = "/(.*)". // First part of the string "%([^A-Z]{1,3})%". // if "\(%([^A-Z]{1,10})%\)". // Variable "(\D{0,1})". // ? "(.*)". // Whatever is before the variable (if applicable) "%([a-z]{1,3})%". // Variable "((.*):". // Rest of true statement "(.*))". "%([a-z]{1,3})%". // if "(.*)/i"; // rest of string I also need it to be more robust than what I have right now, it needs to be able to parse the above statement, but not break if I don't have a %value% after the question mark and if there is one after the colon, but I don't know how to do the conditional statements. The array could have more than 7 values but I need all the stuff out of the %% in it's own array index (I don't know if index is the right word but I basically need the stuff in the %% to be in it's own array part (i.e. $array[1])). Any help at all would be much appreciated, I have looked both on the php website and any other regex places that I could find on google and they are all confusing to me. Thank You, Mike funyon@funyon.com mmacrae@wwnet.net