Hi, I have a simple project that I thought I'd have a crack at in Ruby. I want to retrieve a list of names from a web page but the Ruby interpreter is giving me allot of trouble in parsing the pattern for the regular expression. The pattern I wanted to use was the following : pattern = /<span\sclass\s=\s"rankingName"><a\shref="w3xp-player-profile.aspx\?Gateway= ([^&]*)&PlayerName=([^"]*)">((\n|.)*?)</a></span>/ understandably the forward slash in the closing span tag causes Ruby to think this is the end of the pattern. Hence my question is how the heck do I escape this? Thanks Paul B.T.W I realise that following works just as well... pattern = /<span\sclass\s=\s"rankingName"><a\shref="w3xp-player-profile.aspx\?Gateway= ([^&]*)&PlayerName=([^"]*)">((\n|.)*?)</