Still having ereg migranes

Sorry to repost this, but I haven't found a solution and it's still nagging me. Maybe some of you can come up with something I can't. Here was my original post: I've made myself an <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN"> tag that contains in the value attribute a list of comma-delimited numbers. I need to find if a certain number is in these tags (and each file contains one tag). I need an ereg statement that will let me search these lines to see if a number exists, obviously in the beginning or the end or the middle or if it's the only number in the list. So, say I need #1, I need to grep each file to find if 1 is in its INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" list. Here's what I mean (searching for number 1): <INPUT TYPE = "HIDDEN" NAME = "numbers" VALUE = "1,2,3,4,5"> //beginning <INPUT TYPE = "HIDDEN" NAME = "numbers" VALUE = "0,1,2,3,4,5"> //middle <INPUT TYPE = "HIDDEN" NAME = "numbers" VALUE = "5,4,3,2,1"> //end <INPUT TYPE = "HIDDEN" NAME = "numbers" VALUE = "1"> //only I can't grab all the tags and search for it in PHP (there would be too many tags to parse through and I'd rather let the OS handle that). I need to do this at the operating system level. Does anybody yet have a solution? I *know* it's possible, but I can't get it and I've been working on it for days now. This is one of those really annoying bugs that really grates on a programmer. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site http://webhosting.yahoo.com