Of course, after posting this, I made a resounding smack of my hand on my forehead. Since a greedy .* will take as much as it can without invalidating the search, I simply added .* to the beginning of the search. The greedy .* sucks up everything it can until the last HREF before the date. It doesn't take that because that is specified in the regex as a seperate element. If it gobbled up the HREF before the date, the expression would be invalid, so it leaves the one I want alone. Works like a charm.