regexp help please!

I'm writing a PHP script inspired by smartypants and textile (but for PHP), which among other things does smart quoting. However, I want to avoid smart quotes inside all tags (all quotes inside < and >). Since there are numerous functions accounting for numerous special cases, AND the fact that there will be very few tags with quotes (<a> is all so far), I'm thinking it's be easiest to go back through the converted text and replace all converted smart characters back to stupid ones something like $out = preg_replace("/<(.*?)[&#8220;|&#8221;](.*?)>/","<\\1\"\\2>",$in); // doubles $out = preg_replace("/<(.*?)[&#8217;|&#821;](.*?)>/","<\\1'\\2>",$in); // singles would be nice, but it isn't working, and I think this is stretching my skills in preg's waaay too far. simularly, I'd like to preserver / de-convert any text contained with <pre></pre> tags Any hints would be great! Justin French