I have this line I'm trying to fix:

$body=eregi_replace("&lt;([^:]*://[^ >\n\t]*)&gt;", "<a href=\"\\1\">\\1</a>", $body);

My problem here is the regexp is greedy, so everything between one &lt; and the last &gt; are being seen as a single match. I wanted to fix the code with:

$body=eregi_replace("&lt;([^:]*://[^ >\n\t]*?)&gt;", "<a href=\"\\1\">\\1</a>", $body);

This adds a question mark after the second * wildcard. In theory this might make the * match be non-greedy, so it'd match off the first &gt; and not the last. But I get an error message:

Warning: REG_BADRPT in /home/roy/public_html/phorum/post.php3 on line 183

is this really an illegal regexp? From reading the regexp docs it seems adding a ? after any * should be valid. I also tried putting the ? outside the (), which compiles, but it still matche greedily.