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 . Structure is as below: --Reply below this line to respond-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Email body message... When replying to the message, it becomes: New Message reply...... --Reply below this line to respond-- old message body. 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?