I've been trying to match the pattern below for about a week and can't seem to get it right. I need to match a specific string that is not hyper-linked or enclosed in brackets.I'm sure the code below won't match what i need. It's simply to illustrate what i'm aiming to accomplish: [^\{] word here[^\} ]  Any ...

Ok, so you will not be using groups. In that case you can use lookahead and lookbehind with this regular expression. (?<=((<[^>]*>)[^<>/]*))(padding)(?=([^<>/]*(</[^>]*>))) It will let you replace the word specified in the middle. Brendan