title: str_replace not working
body: <p>I want to delete all occurrences of this substring from my html file:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;span style="font-size: 12pt;"&gt;BLANK PAGE&lt;/span&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried str_replace, thinking that would be a simple solution, but it does not work:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$html = str_replace('&lt;span style="font-size: 12pt;"&gt;BLANK PAGE&lt;/span&gt;', '', $html);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any suggestions?</p>
  
  <p>UPDATE:  Mystery solved!  Thanks to everyone for letting me know that this <em>should</em> work.  Turns out the problem had nothing to do with str_replace!  I had grabbed the html string from firebug, not realizing that firebug inserts spaces to "prettify" the html.  That's why str_replace failed to find this exact pattern.
  I would ideally like to delete this question,  since the problem ended up having nothing to do with str_replace.  Is that possible?</p>