Thank you very much. I translated from my original code to a 'dumbed down' version to get the issue across more easily. I guess I didnt do a good enough job.

For one, I should have added that the xml string has no line breaks in it and without those your regex doesnt seem to work anymore. (tried only on notepad++'s regex plugin, though)

I was also actually using the '\.'. Im sorry for not putting it in here.

It's kind of complicated to explain why I can only use a regex. It has to do with a piece of software I have to use that only takes regex as an input param to retrieve information out of a file. I have heard about regex being a terrible idea for parsing xml and I try to avoid it as often as possible. However, Im not entirely sure about the reasons. You happen to have a good resource to read up on this?

Thank you very much!