> As you say . matches everything but newlines. However there's a set > of pattern modifiers that change this, and other, behaviours of the > regular expression: > > http://www.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php > > So, if you instead use this pattern: > > /(.*)__START_STYLE__(.*)__END_STYLE__(.*)/s > > ( note the trailing s ) Brilliant! Perfect! Thank you very much. :) Fred <tip type="PHP" author="Fred Jones"> Interesting read here: http://shiflett.org/blog/2006/jan/addslashes-versus-mysql-real-escape-string about "addslashes() Versus mysql_real_escape_string()" </tip>