This might be a stretch...

Why exactly are you doing this? It looks like you are trying to pull from the output of Data::Dumper's dump() function. I believe you could simply eval() this whole thing and pull out the items using foreach(keys %hash).

I might be off base here, but I'd like to know what you plan on doing with the data you have at hand because there might be an easier solution than regexping.

John J Reiser
newrisedesigns.com