RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags I need to match all of these opening tags: <p> <a href="foo"> But not these: <br /> <hr class="foo" /> I came up with this and wanted to make sure I've got it right. I am only capturing the a-z. <([a-z]+) *[^/]*?> I believe it says: Find a less-than, then Find (and capture) a-z one or more times, then Find zero or more spaces, then Find any character zero or more times, greedy, except /, then Find