Is there a faster way to escape special characters in a regex?

Hi all, At the moment I'm doing this to escape all "special" regular expression characters from my regex string: $badwordtest = str_replace("/","",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace("\\","",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace("^","\^",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace(".","\.",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace("[","\[",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace("$","\$",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace("(","\(",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace(")","\)",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace("|","\|",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace("*","\*",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace("+","\+",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace("?","\?",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace("{","\{",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace("}","\}",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = str_replace("\\","\\",$badwordtest); $badwordtest = "/" . $badwordtest . "/i"; if (preg_match($badwordtest,$word)) { $directmatch = TRUE; } Is there a way to either do this all in one go or even better, have the ereg itself ignore those characters if they are contained in the string? The idea is that I want to check a word for swearing by doing a direct comparison with a list of swear words, however the word I check could easily contain a special character so I need to escape it before the test commences. Suggestions very welcome! Cheers, Richard -- Fatal Design http://www.fatal-design.com Atari / DarkBASIC / Coding / Since 1995