RE: [PHP] preg_replace and emails

>http://www.php.net/manual/en/pcre.pattern.syntax.php > >I read the above page and supposely if I add (?<!foo)bar then it will find >an occurance of "bar" that is not preceeded by "foo" but it's not >working >for me. > >What am I doing wrong? >$text = >preg_replace("/(?<!mailto:)([\w-?&;#~=\.\/]+\@(\[?)[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.([a-zA- >Z]{2,3}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?))/i","<A >HREF=\"mailto:$1\">$1</A>", $text); My guess is that you are not escaping the special php string characters. Since you use a string to pass your regex you have to escape all occurences of \, $ and " with a \ in front. The above should read /(?<!mailto:)([\\w-?&;#~=}\\.\\/]+\\@(\\[?)[a-zA-Z0-9\\-\\.]+\\.([a-zA- >Z]{2,3}|[0-9]{1,3})(\\]?))/i (I was unable to test this at work :( ) You can test your regex by echoing to screen before passing it to preg_replace that way you can see what is actually passed to preg_replace. Don't forget php will first parse your string before the regex engine gets a pass at it. Hope this helps Stefan Langer