replace special characters

Hello everybody! I was wondering if you could help me with a little problem I ran into some days ago. In my database I have some information about file paths. Originally, those paths come from a Windows Excel spreadsheet and look like "..\1 PDF Filer\65051.PDF". In my PHP code I try to do two things: 1) replace ".." with a string like "file://server/folder" 2) replace all "\" characters with "/". The PHP code looks something like: $path_to_file = "..\1 PDF Filer\65051.PDF"; $things_to_look_for = array("..", "\"); $things_to_replace_with = array("file://server/folder", "/"); $link = str_replace($things_to_look_for, $things_to_replace_with, $path_to_file); The big problem is the character "\" which, if I got it right, in UNICODE is used for things like expressing line breaks ('\n' or something like this). The code above is resulting in the following error massage: "Parse error: parse error, expecting `')'' in /xxx/xxx/xxx/TMPz06yoces6o.php on line 2." Is there a simple solution for this problem? Regards, Frank