preg_replace() Help

Could someone please give me a ridiculously over detailed explaination of the function preg_replace()?

http://php.mirrors.ilisys.com.au/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

I went to that. It's not over detailed enough. :(

PHP manual @ http://php.net/ is the ultimate solution.

http://www.mediasworks.com/

that's what my link was to.

regular expressions are interesting, even with an excellent and detailed tutorial, I'd have to say, IMO, regular expressions are one of the most difficult aspects of scripting.
What is it you are looking to do, perhaps one of us can script it up for you.

No I don't need scripting done for me. I just want to know how it works. I just don't get this stuff about patterns and whatever.

Ok I was able to figure out enough about it to make a simple BBcode. I guess it was all the slashes and (.*?) and whatever else that was confusing me.

Regular expressions tend to work really similarly across platforms and languages.
If the symbols confuse you, perhaps a basic regexp reference would help.
Try here.
http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html