ereg_replace help

Hi All, I have an array of strings in the following format: "abcd - rst" "abcd - uvw" "abcd - xyz" "foobar - rst" "blah - rst" "googol - uvw" What I want to do is strip everything from the " - " bit of the string to the end, _but_ only for the strings that don't start with "abcd" I was thinking something like the following: echo ereg_replace("(!abcd) - xyz", "\\1", $str)."\n"; but obviously this doesn't work, otherwise I wouldn't be emailing the list... Can anyone help? I need to use ereg_replace() because it's part of our code library and therefore can't change :( TIA Martin