In regards to your question: " P.S. - I also just noticed that in addition to stripping out the 'g' option, the 'x' option doesn't seem to work in the regex's parens, i.e. - (?x).

I don’t understand what you’re saying here. Can you give some example code?"

Please see my response to the 1st response above. Using the original data from the original question, (?x) doesn't parse the same as when it is used as a suffix. It misses the 1st match, which at the least, is counter-intuitive, if not broken, no?