Very cool, thanks! It's a seductive solution, being even faster than the original regexes, but I'm having pangs about "correctness" of the format... By letting each sub-regex consume its trailing newline, I can no longer enforce that the main keywords are the first token on any given line, and input like this (all smushed together on one line) isn't flagged as illegal/unknown syntax:

In other words, way too liberal in what I accept! :-) The commercial tools would reject that instantly. But, for my reporting and analysis purposes, it's harmless, and it would let me move to 5.30 and pick up the other benefits of a more modern Perl... Hmm.

I did spend some time experimenting/trying to write the sub-regexes to avoid the possibly-poisonous "\s* ^ \s*" to instead all begin with "\G ^" by either having each sub-regex consume their respective newline OR consuming them all in a separate sub-regex (like sw1 suggested in their "# march through any white space"), but I couldn't get it to work. I think it may be a catch-22 scenario: if the newline is present/next in the string, "\G ^" won't match it, since it matches after a newline. But if the newline has been consumed, "\G ^" also won't match it, since it's not there...)