I am trying to strip everything between a key phrase and ending tag but for some reason it is not working. I always get blank data. I've tried many different ways but no luck.

Basically I have a script that connect to IMAP and store emails into MySQL as service tickets. It works great but I am trying to strip off everything except for user reply because currently if a user reply to an email it re-inserts the entire email into MySQL. I added a key phrase at the top of all outgoing emails .

1. Structure is as below:

    --Reply below this line to respond--
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   
   Email body message...
   

2. When replying to the message, it becomes:

   New Message reply......
   
   --Reply below this line to respond--
   
   old message body.
   

3. I would only like to insert the new reply message only.

This is what I've got so far:

$message = strip_tags($message, "<br><div><p><u><hr></section>");

$message=preg_replace("</p>", "br /", $message);

$message=preg_replace('#--REPLY above this line to respond--(.*?)</section>)#s', ' ', $message);

$message=clean("<br/><hr><u>Received On $rep_date / $from_email</u><br><br/>$message");

It inserts the Received On date and From but $message is blank.

If I remove $message=preg_replace('#--REPLY above this line to respond--(.*?)</section>)#s', ' ', $message); it inserts the entire email.

Any suggestion on what i am doing wrong?