Regular expressions

Hi there, I have serious probems resolving regular expressions. I wish to replace a substring with a given pattern with results of a function with a backreference used as argument. SAMPLE: function check_this_out($somevalue) { $url_array = ''; $i=0; $query = "SELECT SomeRow FROM SomeTable WHERE SomeRowID='$somevalue';"; $result = mysql_query($query) or die (mysql_error().$query); $someow = mysql_fetch_array($result); var_dump($somerow); return ($query); } $output = 'aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. [link=&quot;21&quot;]This is a test[/link]'; echo ($output); echo ('<br />'); $output = ereg_replace('\[link=&quot;([[:graph:]]+)&quot;]',check_this_out('\1'), $output); echo ('<br />'); var_dump ($output); $output2 = 'aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. [link=&quot;21&quot;]This is another test[/link]'; echo ($output); echo ('<br />'); $output2 = ereg_replace('/\[link=&quot;([[:graph:]]+)&quot;]/',check_this_out('\1'), $output); echo ('<br />'); var_dump ($output2); The problem is, that although the $query string in this example will echo as "SELECT SomeRow FROM SomeTable WHERE SomeRowID='21';", where $somevalue has been replaced by '21' as a result by the regular expressions, it will eventually render as "SELECT SomeRow FROM SomeTable WHERE SomeRowID='\1';" when mysql is called, return the row with SomeRowID='\1', which incidently is not the row I want... I tried type casting to no avail. Has anybody experienced similar problems or know how to get around this? My php version is somewhere between 4.3.4 and 4.3.5... a 4.3.5-dev... Best Regards Peter Normann ?>