Hi hv, Yes, you stated it quite well, that's what I meant to say but was sloppy in using the phrase "that point in the regex" instead of "that point in the string". Thanks for the correction. And you have also confirmed what I suspected was the problem, that because the effect of the /?!.*batch/ was over the entire string rather than the part of the string to which the parenthesized expression applied (such as (?i) for temporarily matching case insensitively) the expression as a whole contained a contradiction and the whole would never match. -fireblood