Just curious: Why are ereg_ functions never to be used? If you need to handle POSIX compatible regular expressions instead of PCRE, wouldn't you use ereg_ instead of preg_ ? (Or am I wrong about this?)
For some reason I thought that the ereg_* functions were deprecated; that's not the case. I was wrong in saying they should never be used; however, it remains the case that preg_* is usually faster.