RE: [PHP] what's wrong with ereg_replace's \\1 ?

There is no way for the function call to transcript to recieve the \\1 value from ereg_replace, it is only going to get the literal \\1 and then the output from transcript will be sent to ereg_replace. The only way that you could do it is with preg_replace (which is part of the much faster and more flexible preg_functions, but has the disadvantage that it inherits all the quirkiness of perl regular expressions). To do what you want to do is quite easy (WARNING: Untested code, but you should get the idea). preg_replace("/&([^;]+);/e", "transcript('\\1', $iso8859_1)", $string); Note that you have to use /e modifier, which tells the preg_replace interpreter to execute the what it finds in the replacement string. See http://www.php.net/manual/function.preg-replace.php for full details. -----Original Message----- From: Jakob To: php-general@lists.php.net Sent: 27/08/00 8:52 AM Subject: [PHP] what's wrong with ereg_replace's \\1 ? Hi, I have the following $string = "abcd °efgh äijklm". I need to replace the character entities with their numeric counterparts (XML requirement). I have a function transcript($entity, $map) that takes an $entity and returns the numeric equivalent if it exists. I thought I could do this: ereg_replace("&([^;]+);", transcript("\\1", $iso8859_1), $string); But apparently in this function call the "\\1" is taken literally ... Does anybody know I could achieve the same effect using another way? Thank you very much in advance, Jakob.