preg_replace...er, What it Do?
 

Assuming I wanted to replace a large portion of the navbar template with a custom template, let's say from [minicode]<!-- nav buttons bar -->[/minicode] to [minicode]<!-- / nav buttons bar -->[/minicode], would the first part of this plugin be correct?

This is assuming that dot matches newlines. What I don't know what to do know, is what to do with the [minicode]preg_replace[/minicode] function itself. I thought something like:

But until I've got the first part right, I'm just guessing. Not to mention, I have no idea which hook will work in this case.

do you want to change it on all the pages? ... or?

--------------- Added [DATE]1382856632[/DATE] at [TIME]1382856632[/TIME] ---------------

also post exactly what you want to replace so i can write the regex for you

I think what you have is almost right. You need the '/' delimiters around the entire pattern, and you need an 's' modifier at the end so that the '.' will match newlines. So Try:

"\s\S" matches anything, including line breaks.

/<!-- nav buttons bar[\s\S]+?nav buttons bar -->/

Ah, so I had my delimiters in the wrong place. Thanks for that. I'm pretty sure I can figure out the regex, but I wasn't sure if my PHP syntax was correct to start with. So the actual preg_replace function is written correctly?

And, I guess, there's no way to be sure about which hook to use.

The call looks correct. I think parse_templates is a good hook to use, since you know the templates will be cached at that time.

Looks like the regex works (totally forgot about [\s\S] ), and I got the navbar to disappear on global_complete and parse_templates. Yeah, parse_templates seems like the better one to use. Only thing now is the content of my custom template is not being inserted. But, at least I'm farther along than I was. Thanks again.

Yeah, I was actually thinking vb4, but in vb3 global_start works too.

Interesting, I can get replace to work if I put the raw HTML in the $replace variable, but not my custom template. This line must still be wrong:

Is your template being cached? If not you need a plugin on hook cache_templates and add the name of your template to the $globaltemplates array, or else you can call fetch_template() (although that would add an extra db query).