Hello, I am using C# in Visual Studio 2008.  I have a text file of the entire Bible that I am wanting to either put into a database or write to an XML document.  The format of the text is as follows with comments in C# single line comment style to the right of the actual text (example: Genesis  //book ...

The problem is with the way you are looking. When you check the character before the , you are telling the regular expression to include it. Use this expression which has a lookbehind expression in it. It will check the character before the comma and not include it in the match. (?<=[^\\]), I hope that helps, Brendan 

Ok, so you will not be using groups. In that case you can use lookahead and lookbehind with this regular expression. (?<=((<[^>]*>)[^<>/]*))(padding)(?=([^<>/]*(</[^>]*>))) It will let you replace the word specified in the middle. Brendan