the default mode for regular expressions is to process each line individually, so it's not that . matches anything but newlines -- it's just that newlines are never included in what gets processed.

you need to put it in multiline mode to get the newlines included. I'm pretty sure it's a flag you pass to the preg_* functions but it's been a while

Cool thanks misterhaan. I'll check it out tomorrow. I hope it is as simple as that, I didn't pay much attention to reg expressions in class , should have...

I wonder if just the php str_replace() would be the best option. I only need to do it twice, once for the beginning of quotes and ending of quotes... hmm. Then again, that means twice the run time in the search...

I have an old board I made, I am upgrading it to a new ajax based board I made. I didn't allow quoting on the old board, so line breaks were not a issue before. The ajax board should cut down on bandwidth and database grabs in theory lol since everything is loaded once as their own object, so only one of the many objects are changed at any time.