s{(?<=Re:) \(\w+\)}{}g;
[download]

$& has its uses too, in this case it was the best way I could come up with. ;-)

I suppose what I was wondering was why you left your match unmemorized, and then used $&. I've been lead to believe that's bad form, since once you open that Pandora's box ($`, $& and $'), all your regexes become slower as a result.

Oh. I had actually forgot that. Do you know if that is the same thing with @- and @+? I can use those instead, at the price of higher obfuscation... :)

Thanks for the heads up!

(I just *had* to change the Re: style *grin*).

---

You have moved into a dark place.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Like tadman++ noted the problem is that once you use it, all regexes anywhere in the script become slower - not likely to be tolerable in the context of the Everything engine.. And this one in particular is pretty simple: $title =~ s{((?:Re: ){2,})}{"Re(" . length($1)/4 . "): "}ge; Works a treat for your test cases.

Makeshifts last the longest.

--
perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"

/s