Error checking and escaping before running a query (MySQL)

Hi all I have a searchbox that throws a wobbly when certain characters are entered into it - basically the user is supposed to enter a space-delimited list of words to search for, and then I create an array from it and turn it into an OR etc query. What I initially did was replace all commas with spaces, but I've realised that double-quotes mess it up too. The command I used for the spaces is $searchbox = ereg_replace(" ," ," ", $searchbox); I tried $searchbox = ereg_replace(" \"" ," ", $searchbox); but the page shows an error of Warning: REG_EPAREN: in d:\apache\htdocs\dev\code\can_search_quick.php on line 22 there's a parse error if I don't escape the ", so what can I do? I know how to do it in VB! I searched PHP.net, but could only find an old bug report that advised escaping special characters! Help! Thanks in advance Dave