Well, that's exactly what it should match. Your input matches your requirements. It has a block of text consisting of between 1 and 4 (1 in this case) lines of not more than 40 characters and an additional newline.

Your requirements are poorly specified.

Maybe, rather than see if your input matches such a block, you want to see if your input is such a block. If this is the case, your example input wouldn't work even if the second line had less than forty characters because your third line doesn't have a trailing newline.

If that is what you are trying to do, try this:

/
^               # Anchor to beginning of string.
  (?:           # Group each line.
     .{0,40}\n  # 0 to 40 characters followed by a newline. 
  ){0,4}        # 0 to 4 lines.
$               # Anchor to end of string.
/x;             # /x for comments.
[download]

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

WOW SAROQ! I think that finally did it! Thanks for all your help in this. As far as requests go, it is tough explaining things, and I know you gurus are excellent at responding quickly, that I get impatient. Sorry, learnt my lesson here.

Anyway, my boss is going to test it, and lets hope it goes well for her.

One quick question, I dont understand what the ?: at the beginning of the regex does. I took the comments out. What's the diff between these:

1. ($foo =~ /^(?:.{0,40}\n){0,4}$/
2. ($foo =~ /^(.{0,40}\n){0,4}$/ # note no ?:
[download]

CHEERS MATE!
Robert

Without the ?: the parens will capture the match into $1. You probably don't need to capture. Presumably, not capturing will give you slightly better performance, though it probably wouldn't be noticeable unless you were doing a whole lot of matching.

Glad I could help.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";