i believe you that the options are mutually exclusive, but i never program as such. it's difficult to guarantee non-trivial regexes will indeed match exclusively on all input data. and hence i would either pre-run all regexes or other such programming to eliminate non-exclusivity OR allow all regexes to match against input and make normal logic decisions + sane decisions on possible anomalies. that's the kind of defensive programming i'd do if time allows. it's always a balancing act in handling program input, but i think a little scepticism in programming itself is a good thing. hence my advice...even though it's not inline with the spec. take it or leave it as you please.