note 79755 added to function.preg-replace

I've been looking for a long time in order to find a solution for ampersands which were introduced as & in a database, which should be posted as &amp; in the generated page without altering the existing HTML tags which should be posted as HTML tags (so htmlentities(); or htmlspecialchars(); won't do it), nor altering the existing HTML entities. After hours of Goggling because my RegEx knowledge is less than average ... I wrote my own solution which works quite fine ... <?php function repl_amp($text) { $text=preg_replace("/&(?!amp;)/i", "&amp;", $text); // This matches and replaces all amperands which are not written as &amp; $text=preg_replace("/&amp;(#\d+);|&amp;(\w+);/i", "&$1;", $text); // This fixes the broken numeric/literal HTML Entities which might be broken by the previous preg_replace(); call, yes, I couldn't avoid breaking the entities return $text; // Of course ... ye output } ?> If someone can do a better solution ... please go ahead ... ---- Server IP: 69.147.83.197 Probable Submitter: 89.122.151.77 ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php Edit -- https://master.php.net/note/edit/79755 Del: integrated -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/79755/integrated Del: useless -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/79755/useless Del: bad code -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/79755/bad+code Del: spam -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/79755/spam Del: non-english -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/79755/non-english Del: in docs -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/79755/in+docs Del: other reasons-- https://master.php.net/note/delete/79755 Reject -- https://master.php.net/note/reject/79755 Search -- https://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php