Thanks to Texas Tess, Zaxo, and dvergin for patient explanations of both the obvious and the arcane. Also, next time I have a regex problem, maybe I'll brave the debugger. That was very enlightening.

FWIW, the data I'm parsing is in 'betacode', an ASCII transcription scheme for Ancient Greek. It's convenient in some ways, but chock full of what I still have to remind myself are metacharacters. Grrr.

BCE
--Your punctuation skills are insufficient!