Thanks Corion. That is good to know. I'll zero in on the perl code then.

Hi Monks, just wanted to follow up with what i did to get this to finally work. I don't really understand why i had to do it, but maybe one of the Monks will.

The issue is that in an Oracle client (TOAD for example) the following col of a select statement worked, but within perl using DBI it did not. Ultimately, i had to escape the backslash character....so \W+...became....\\W+

From:

regexp_substr(SDSM2.MSG_BODY,'(:16R:ACCTINFO)\W+(:95[[:alnum:]]*)*\W+:
+97A::SAFE//'||SDSM1.ACT_N||'(.+?):16S:ACCTINFO',1,1,'n') as accnt_inf
+o,
[download]

To:

regexp_substr(SDSM2.MSG_BODY,'(:16R:ACCTINFO)\\W+(:95[[:alnum:]]*)*\\W
++:97A::SAFE//'||SDSM1.ACT_N||'(.+?):16S:ACCTINFO',1,1,'n') as accnt_i
+nfo,
[download]

After making that change it worked inside perl.

thanks for the help!

Did you use double quotes in Perl to store the sql query?
map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]