hello and a question

Hi. I just joined the list and, of course, I have a question. I've searched for quite a bit of time now, but to no avail.. mostly, I suspect, because all the relevant search terms are to broad. But heres my problem: I have a journal I whipped up and tweak often that uses PHP and MySQL (no small club there. :p ). The functionality I'm trying to add right now is to be able to enclose text in a <hide> tag (what? you didnt see that "hide"? html and email just don't mix) and it will not be displayed in the browser. example: I had a good day today. <hide>I shot the milkman. </hide>Tho nothign much happened. then i use: $entry_hidden = eregi_replace("<hide>.+</hide>","<hidden>",$entry); and this works just fine, replacing the "secret" text with a non-displayed <hidden> tag. The problem arises when I use the tag 2 or more times: Hey <hide>losers!</hide> I think that I <hide> do not</hide> like corn. in this case, the above blurb gets outputted as: hey <hidden> like corn. So how do I make it stop pattern-matching when it reaches the first instance of </hide>, and make it work properly for each subsequent set of the tag? This is prolly something pretty basic in regular expressions, but in my limited working knowledge (and the 3 tutorials I've tried), it's not addressed. searches in the archive, the php manual, and google have also failed me. worthy list? I thank you in advance and hope I can tolerate the mail volume long enough to return the favor. --kevin