I haven't dug around the magic tomes to look for a solid answer, but.. are all the $variables spaced? Are there any cases of embeded variables, i.e. 2 Monkey$pluralSwitch? If all $variables are preceeded by a space, then you can have the expression hunt for " $" explicitly. This will skip each " \$" datum. I guess that would be s/\s\$(\w+)//g Just a lazy Sunday thought. -T