Regular Expression Query

I think the most difficult thing I've encountered so far in trying to learn PHP, as a novice programmer, is regular expressions. I'm trying to use ereg_replace on a string containing a large quantity of data taken from a webpage which I then parse using the explode function. One regularly occuring string is: (Reference #xxx) Where xxx is a number of up to 3 digits. I want to replace this string using back references to just xxx and I've tried using the following: $out = ereg_replace("\(Reference #.([0-9]+).\)","\\1",$in); I just can't suss why this doesn't work. Any pointers anyone? Allan www.cybercandy.co.uk