this allow you to start from a specific word and ends to a specific character for example to extract part of links that are between quotes or a part of code for example <panorama parent="pan_test" id="**mail/33/0_pan/asdgfjdh_0**" index="0" /> mine regex will allow you to extract and get only the mail/33/0_pan/asdgfjdh_0 part then by using ^ for the start line and $ for the end line you can complete the link with the relative parts if you know it or in case of a not link, you can easily extract a list of data/names hope this will help you as it helped me after month of researching, thanks to anonymous user, because the most known regex [^] doesn't work to exclude the first special char as the quotes " so i hope this will help you... tick the up button if you want to let me know that you visited and maybe also used my regex syntax :D :P hug