By default, regex matching is greedy. That is, wildcards will match the longest possible chunk of input, so you need to make your .* non-greedy. You do that by putting a ? after it, so your line becomes Regex blogsRegEx = new Regex(@"<entry><id>tag:myblog.*?</entry>"); If you are going to do ANYTHING nontrivial with regexes, get a copy of Expresso. (See our Free Tools forum for details.) Cheers, Peter Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994.