One thing that both posters so far missed -- unless you're doing some pre-filtering you aren't showing, $msg will be in a psudoHTML, and there will be several HTML tags preceding the visable text, so you don't want to anchor that sorry to the beginning of the string with a ^, or you want to filter out the HTML. To filter out the HTML, somthing like s/<.*?>//g should work for simple cases... and, if I guess correctly, you'll never see a non-simple case in AIM-HTML.