ereg-replace ... how to catch :'( [crying smiley] ???

I'm trying to do graphical smileys for my guestbook, but I've run into a problem with the crying smilies: I need to replace :'( and :'-( ... or as they look in the post after being entered through htmlentities with ent_quotes on: :&#039;( :&#039;-( this causes the entire message to disappear: $text = ereg_replace(':&#039;-?(','<img src="'.$smiley_path.'/crying.gif" alt=":&#039;(" width="25" height="15" align="absmiddle">',$text); only the format of the search part differs from my other smiley replacements, so obviously that's where the problem is ... afaik, neither &, # or ; have any meaning in regex, so I don't get what causes it ... I've tried escaping all of those chars, and it still causes $text to come back empty... any ideas will be highly appreciated... TIA Rene -- Rene Brehmer aka Metalbunny ~ If you don't like what I have to say ... don't read it ~ http://metalbunny.net/ References, tools, and other useful stuff... Check out the new Metalbunny forums @ http://forums.metalbunny.net/