PHP Manual . ... PHP 3 <= 3.0.18, PHP 4 >= 4.0.0) ereg -- Regular expression match . int ereg ( string pattern, string string [, array regs]) . ... Searches a string for matches to the regular expression given in pattern . If matches are found for parenthesized substrings of pattern and the function is called with the third argument regs , the matches will be stored in the elements of the array regs . ... If no matches are found, $regs will not be altered by ereg() . ... ereg_replace ...