Regular Expression Problem

Hi List I must be dumb as I have been battling my way through regular expression examples for a while and I can not work out why the following does not work properly. I am the first to admit that regular expressions confuse me greatly. The string is a piece of XML as follows and I have put that string into a variable called $xml_string <flights> <flight flightId="19417361" addAdtPrice="0.0" addChdPrice="0.0" addInfPrice="0.0"> <legXRefs> <legXRef legId="23862812" class="V"></legXRef> <legXRef legId="23862813" class="V"></legXRef> </legXRefs> </flight> <flight flightId="19417360" addAdtPrice="0.0" addChdPrice="0.0" addInfPrice="0.0"> <legXRefs> <legXRef legId="23862810" class="V"></legXRef> <legXRef legId="23862811" class="V"></legXRef> </legXRefs> </flight> </flights> What I am trying to do is extract the first <flight ..... /flight> chunk. I am using the following, based on the example at http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php example 3 preg_match('#<flight .*\/flight>#', $xml_string,$matches); $tempstr = $matches[0]; What I actually get in $tempstr is everything from the first <flight through to the last (second) </flight> I would have expected preg_match to have matched from the first <flight through to the first </flight>. I suspect I do not have the regular expression correct. I would great appreciate any help on sorting out the regular expression so that it only returns the first chunk of the string. Regards, Richard Luckhurst