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 ...

Thanks again Sergei. I found the solution, your regex was perfect, it's just a PHP oddity. This page on php.net: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php describes pre_replace and c_stewart0a at yahoo dot com had the solution which is: "you will want to quote your searching expression with /" This did the job. So ...