OK, I'm willing to try sticking my foot in my mouth one more time. ;-) Negative lookahead if you want to match something not followed by something else. Like if you wanted to find a q that wasn't followed by a u: q(?!u) So say we want to match anything zero or more times that isn't followed by anything zero or more times... .*(?!.*) I can't find anything that the above regex will match, and if I change it to a positive look ahead .*(?=.*) it matches everything... It might work. Good luck. -- Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue >0; 0 rows returned