Topic awaiting preservation: Search a string containing HTML-tags

Hi there.

I have a search string (for example $q="xml") and a string ($string) containing "xml".
I want to highlight the search string in the $string variable.

This is the way i replace the string:
$string = preg_replace("/(".$q.")/i", "<span class=\"hilite\">$1</span>", $string);

But when $string contains something like "blablablah <a href="site.xml" title="site.xml">My XML File</a> blah blah blah xml blah", everything gets messed up.

My question is, who can i manage, that everything inside "<>" is excluded?

Thanks for your help.

uh. you're asking for trouble with this.

I'd use strireplace to do the replacment - you never know what's gonna be in $q next, and you'll hate it when the regxeps breaks because of some special chars in $q.

Anyhow, I guess you could use a regexps and preg_matchreplace_callback top pull out all tags and store them in an array, and store ####aLittelTag#### in their place. Then you do whatever it is you're doing now, then you do it backwards, ie. replace all ####aLittleTag#### in a callback with the actual tags poped out of the array.

Clear?