I'm a beginner in Perl, but I think your breakdown of my code explains exactly what I want it to do. I went a little crazy with the escapes though. I'll need the s modifer for some other cases, though it's unnecessary for this example. I'd like the special meanings of the escaped characters on the right of the s/// to be used. I want the element in which the substitution is taking place (@links1[whatever]) to be referred to when Perl is assiging real text to the special characters. Not that you're solution is worse than my proposed one, but I was suprised to learn that mine didn't work.