EXTREME Regular Expression Fustration

[Michael Morris]

This is pissing me the Hell off.

PHP Code:

function spamkill($post)
{
    eval('$blacklist = "' . fetch_template('mtblacklist') . '";');
    $spamlist = explode("\n", $blacklist);

    foreach ($spamlist as $spam)
    {
        // Chop off comment text at the end of some lines as necessary
        if (strstr($spam, '#'))
        {
            $spam = trim(substr($spam, 0, strpos($spam,"#") - 1));
        }
        
        if (!strstr($spam, '#') AND strlen($spam) != 0)
        {    
            preg_match("#$spam#siU", $post['message'], $matches);

            echo $matches[0] . "<br />";
        }
    }

    die;
    return false;
} 


Template mtblacklist contains this file

http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/blacklist.txt

The explode statement works, breaking that list into a line by line array.

The first if statement works, lopping off the comment text.

The preg_match isn't working. Neither will ereg, eregi, strstr or stristr. In fact, NOTHING IS WORKING!!! Even when the post is an EXACTLY COPIED LINE from the blacklist a if($post['message'] == $spam) statement DOESN'T WORK. I'm about to punch a hole in my laptop monitor here. Help.