The parenthesis repacement with the lookahead works. I thought that the solution to the hyphen issue should work with lookahead/behinds, but it didnt. I apoolgize for the confusion, but that example was only to show that the basic mechanism worked on Perl v26 in Win. Oddly, some operators seem to be recalcitrant on Win, as opposed to Linux. Even with stripping permissions/ownership of target files. I am looking for a clean method for parsing hyphens, and my current method often requires a second run.