Thank you! (And thank you for putting aside the odd nature of the program) I saw the \K discussed as a way to do a variable width look behind on page 249 of the camel book but was not grasping it. Also I need to read up on how to use '?'. It appears '^>'is finding and holding the insert place just before the last '>' and the '?=' is marking the search spot for the '\s*\Q$value\E' ? thanks again!