## What I've suggested:
# Please bear in mind, I'm not a PHP user, but I've run this against a PHP Regular Expression tester and it seems to work.

$pee = "<span style="color:red;">Woo Woo</span>";
$pee = preg_replace('/<span((?:!>|.)*)>(.*)<\/span>/', "<strong$1>$2</strong>", $pee);

# output:
# string(43) "<strong style="color:red;">Woo Woo</strong>"

# Let me know if it works as expected.

## What you wanted:
#  this function takes the attributes from a span and plonks them into a strong - this is my basis, all cool.
$pee = preg_replace('/<span([^>]*)>/', "<strong$1>", $pee);

# what I have is a urlencoded string, and want to unencode the spans, using something like this (just swapping > for > and < for < on the spans)

$pee = preg_replace('/<span([^>]*)>/', "<span$1>", $pee);

# but this doesn't work, because the [^>] is searching for any character in there, and not the whole phrase

# WHAT I WANT

# input:

<span style="color:red;">Woo Woo<span>

#output:

<span style="color:red;">Woo Woo</span>

# i would otherwise run php's url decode, but i only want it to decode spans