I submitted this article expecting to learn a few things about my style. In this case, I didn't actually know you could interpolate into regexes like that, so thanks!
And thanks for the typo catch, too.
And thanks for the typo catch, too.
And, just FYI you do need to escape the backrefs or use single quotes, like:
"\\1<span class=\"nurble\">nurble</span>\\2"