Still ereg fails NL/CR despite numerous trials

I've tried a lot of suggestions from the list to get rid of \n & \r, but I still failed. Could some one please lend me a hand? What I wanted to do was to eregi some repetitive info from a (large) portion of a remote html file. I tried both fread() and file(). When I examined the content, \n\r were all around: in the middle of a line as well as at the beginning of consecutive lines. I tried numerous ways to get rid of them including: nl2br eregi_replace("[\n\r]","<br>",$rec) eregi_replace("[\015\012]","<br>",$rec) eregi_replace("\n","<br>",$rec) eregi_replace("\\n","<br>",$rec) . . you name it. I still couldn't get rid of them and therefore my subsequent eregi failed. I even narrowed down my regex on the following text but couldn't get a match: $test_str = "<HTML TAGs> Available <HTML TAGs>1. Beginning Php 4 by Jon Blan" (Mind you: \n\r's are not shown here.) My regex was: eregi_replace("(php)","<font color='red'>\\1</font>","$test_str"); I'm stuck now. Your leading through will be highly appreciated. Thank you very much in advance. PHP & regex newbie, Wingo Chan