I managed to get this to work with PHP 5.1.6 on CentOS 5 with minor difficulty.
1) Download the PECL filter package
2) Extract the tarball
3) phpize the directory
4) ./configure
5) make
6) filter-0.11.0/logical_filters.c:25:31: error: ext/pcre/php_pcre.h: No such file or directory
7) find / -name php_pcre.h
8) Make sure php-devel is installed
9) Edit filter-0.11.0/logical_filters.c and replace "ext/pcre/php_pcre.h" with the absolute path of php_pcre.h
10) make
11) make install
12) add "extension=filter.so" to php.ini
13) Restart Apache
