I'm asking again the same question, coz i guess my question wasn't clear. i just need to retreive vars inside query.txt, my regular expression seems to be correct for me, but i don't find why it doesn't wrk
------ Starting query.txt select * FROM `table` where id='$value' order by name ------ Ending query.txt ------ Starting parse.php <?php $fcontents = join('' , file('query.txt')); preg_match_all("/^('\$(.*)')/si", $fcontents,$matches); print_r($matches) ?> --------- Ending parse.php rewriting query is another question, that i agree also. Thanks Hatem