I have a long string that contains multiple css classes. With regex I would like to match every class name as I then need to replace these class names like so: <span>CLASSNAME</span> I have tried for hours to come up with a solution and I think I am close however for certain class names I am not able to exclude closing curly brackets from the match. Here is a sample string I have been carrying out testing on: #main .items-Outer p{ font-family:Verdana; color: #000000; font-size: 50px; font-weight: bold; }#footer .footer-inner p.intro{ font-family:Arial; color: #444444; font-size: 30; font-weight: normal; }.genericTxt{ font-family:Courier; color: #444444; font-size: 30; font-weight: normal; } And here is the the regex I came up with so far: ((^(?:.+?)(?:[^{]*))|((?:\})(?:.+?)(?:[^{]*))) Please look at the screenshot I am attaching as it will show more clearly the matches I get. My problem is that I would obviously like to exclude curly brackets from any match.