Let me painfully honest: I hate parsing, especially w/ regexp, and I don't care if it's because I stupid and suck at it. It shouldn't have to be this hair pulling! Anyway... Can some one please give the regular expression to match the first square bracket's contents. In this case it would be "Hello". s = <<-EOS [Hello] This [b]is[b.] a test. [Hello.] EOS Much obliged, T.