Thanks for all the obvious things I missed [but seeing the regexes that do the job, I can see why it was tricky to do it by starting with "\d+" Odd - I guessed there was a module that'd do it, and I searched CPAN for "number" and it delivered a lot of modules and the Regexp module didn't show up {what mostly showed up were modules for messing with international phone numbers. :o)} Doesn't matter I guess THANKS ALL!!