DOOOH! I seemed to have missed something. I don't mean to be a pest, but something is not making sense. Anyway, I have made a few renditions of the code offered and every example seems to suffer from a greed problem. I have inserted a while loop to have the regex range over the data until all instances of wirey have been removed between the approprite tags. The same happens w/o the while loop if the in.txt looks like this:

 
sample in.txt

blah...blah...blah
BEGTITLE My dog is stinkey ENDTITLE 
BEGTEXT My dog has wirey hair ENDTEXT
BEGTITLE My dog's name is skip ENDTITLE
blah...blah...blah
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The problem enters when wirey is replaced in the TEXT field. The code seems to gravitate towards testing the last instance of ENDTITLE rather that the 1st. Is this a nesting Issue? I was thinking that nesting is like this .BEGTITLE title BEGTITLE title2 ENDTITLE ENDTITLE, where there is not a balanced symmetry like you might find in a comma delimited file. In my case there is always a ENDTITLE before the appearence of the 2nd+ instance of a BEGTITLE tag. Thanks. I am just trying to learn as much of this as I can. I thought the (.*?) usage would keep the script from being greedy like this.