Rather, advanced I suppose type of question

I'm currently implementing a website for myself, and have been using PHP for sometime, and it seems to work for what I want. My site is stored in a database, and I would like to go through the returned page, and replace my "tags" with appropriate variables. Now, I know I could $the_var = str_replace ("<DOC:CONTENTS>", $doc["contents"], $the_variable). However, I don't really want to have str_replace millions of times :) What I would like to do is something like $the_var = ereg_replace ("<pss:($tag):($variable)>", "{${$tag}[$variable]}", $the_variable); Using Apache's re-write rules I can re-write a url /merc/$1/$2 to /something.php?abc=$1&def=$2, using ^/merc/([^/]+)/?(.*) Would something like <pss:([^:]+):?(.*)> be possible? I come from a windows background, so am still not really used to regular expressions :) (Please note I have not tried the ereg_replace example I gave, it was just a way of showing something of what I would like). This really does have to work on _both_ Win32 (Apache.cgi) and Linux (Apache.mod) Thanks, Patrick.