Parsing out numbers from a string

Hi all I have a small program which captures the output of a webpage and puts the data in to a string variable. I then use teh strip tags function of php to clean it up a bit. then i want to use regular expressions to extract all the numbers from the page ..they are like this usually numbers.numbers (IE: 40.40 ). For some reason my expressions are not matching anything in the string unless i type exactly what i am looking for... could the fact that there are line reurns in the string be causing a problem? or do i need to somehow tell php to goto the next line? I had an older version of the program which saved teh data to a file and then PhP scanned the file line by line..this worked...but i'm trying to make a more elegant solution that won;t kill my hard drive faster ;) Any tips appreciated... John john@atomfx.com