preg_replace problem

Hello, I'm trying to write a piece of code which replace in a string every occurrence of "[something]" with $a["something"] (a is an array resulted from a mysql_fetch_array). However for some reason this code does not work: <?php $a["email"]="test@test.com"; $a["name"]="Foo Bar"; $string="this is a string containing [email] and [name]"; $string=preg_replace("/\[(\w+)\]/e","$a['\\1']",$string); echo "string=$string"; ?> I tried with and without "e" modifier and a lot of combination, all without luck. The problem is that php seems to expand variable before replacing '\\n' which make sense if I don't use the 'e' modifier but don't make sense if I use it. The only thing that seems to work is to write a function which take a key as argument and return the corresponding value: function dumb($key) { global $a; return $a[$key]; } $string=preg_replace("/\[(\w+)\]/e","dumb('\\1')",$string); but if I have more than one array, I have to write a function for every array. I think there is something I miss here, any help will be appreciated. Thank you, Mache