title: Problems with a PHP string
body: <p>I'm having some very odd and serious problems with a string...</p>
  
  <p>For some reason, certain characters in a string are not passing through any functions correctly, and only in one PHP file (it works fine on other pages).</p>
  
  <p>I had something working two days ago, but now there are problems.</p>
  
  <p>For example, I have a string that looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>http://example.com/v/asd238
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm trying to change it to be something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>http://example.com/first/second/v/asd238
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So I had this before:</p>
  
  <pre><code>preg_replace('/http\:\/\/example\.com\/([v|u]*)\/([a-z0-9]*)/i', 'http://example.com/first/second/v/$1/$2');
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But for some reason the ':' and '.' make function basically do nothing. Even on functions like strpos() or str_replace().</p>
  
  <p>I'm wondering why, if I even escape the two with '\', what is going on? I can't even remotely figure out why I'm having this problem.</p>