Without a sample line that is going wrong, this is just a shot in the dark, but does replacing each .*? with ^=* and putting \b before and after img, a, and link help?

[^=]* is not much better than .*?. "A" is not "=", "B" is not "=", "C" is not "=", "D" is not "=", .... Since he's parsing html, he should replace .*? with \s* (regular expressions are easy to write if you know precisely what you're matching).