problem with eval()

hi all, this is my first posting, so if it's not quite right excuse my I have an 'application' which parses a given file, which contains HTML & PHP3. For the HTML lines the application writes the line to Dest_File. For the PHP3 lines it's suppossed to interpret these using the eval() statement, and depending on the PHP3 different text would be written out to the Dest_File. except that doesn't work. here's my code (the contents of $complete_code has been read from SRC_FILE) $complete_code='if ($value == $today) echo "Hello World";'; $temp_string = addslashes($complete_code); eval("\new_string=\"$complete_code\";"); The value of $new_string is then: if (1 == 1) echo "Hello World"; instead of "Hello World" or "" any help on this would be very much appreciated. thanks in advance, alan http://www.ireckon.com