$re = '/class="((\s|[a-zA-Z_-]{1}[\w-_]+)+)"/';
$str = '
<tag class="something else">yeah {{node.node}} </tag>
<tag class="class1 class2">yeah {{node.node}} </tag>';
preg_match_all($re, $str, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER, 0);
// Print the entire match result
var_dump($matches);
Please keep in mind that these code samples are automatically generated and are not guaranteed to work. If you find any syntax errors, feel free to submit a bug report. For a full regex reference for PHP, please visit: http://php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php