regex makes my head hurt

I've been attempting to figure out regex, and I've realized I need to start over from scratch. And get lots of help! I'm inputting a text file containing html which will contain this: <a href="/q?s=IBM&d=t">IBM</a></font></td><td nowrap align=center> <font face=arial size=-1>2:59pm</font></td> <td nowrap><font face=arial size=-1> <b>76.17</b></font></td><td nowrap> I need to be able to match this string via a variable. I would like to put everything from the "<a href>" to the "<td nowrap>" into a variable so I can parse it later. I think I can do that bit on my own. So I "borrowed" some code from another source, but I need an algorithm that will match the above chunk of html. I give it the name: $name = "IBM"; and it matches everything from the "<a href>" to the "<td nowrap>". if (preg_match("/ <a href> part using $name(.*?)<td nowrap>/", $line, $out)) {

       $title = $out[1];
       break;

} } echo "$title"; I can't figure out how to escape all the parts of: <a href="/q?s=$name&d=t"> Do the other parts look okay? _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail