note 66034 added to function.preg-match

Howdy All: I am trying to write a regular expression to basically process dvd titles. For example if I have The Great Mouse Detectives I would like to display Great Mouse Detectives, The I have a function that does almost what I need but when there is a special character i.e( .,!@#$%...) it breaks. A.I. Artificial Intelligence => .I. Artificial Intelligence, A Is there a way that I can get preg_match to exclude a set of characters after it matches the ‘A’? preg_match("/\b$needle\b/i", strtolower($haystack)) $needle is ‘a’ or ‘an’ or ‘the’ and $haystack is the original title. Any help would be awesome!!! ---- Server IP: 216.194.113.175 Probable Submitter: 216.57.65.20 ---- X-Spam-Status: No, hits=3.1 required=5.0 tests=DATE_MISSING,FROM_NO_LOWER autolearn=no version=2.64 ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php Edit -- http://master.php.net/note/edit/66034 Del: integrated -- http://master.php.net/note/delete/66034/integrated Del: useless -- http://master.php.net/note/delete/66034/useless Del: bad code -- http://master.php.net/note/delete/66034/bad+code Del: spam -- http://master.php.net/note/delete/66034/spam Del: non-english -- http://master.php.net/note/delete/66034/non-english Del: in docs -- http://master.php.net/note/delete/66034/in+docs Del: other reasons-- http://master.php.net/note/delete/66034 Reject -- http://master.php.net/note/reject/66034 Search -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php