Also, I take issue (though not on a personal level) with saying that something has to be done in a certain way.

I totally agree with that. Unreservedly.

As for the delimited record format. Maybe I read to much into the post, but I thought that it implied of not stated, that whilst the data was essentially delimited, one or more parts of it had variable numbres of repetitions, and the delimiters were not consistant through out.

Anyway, my tilting at this particular windmill was more a reaction to the general statement about line-noise, rather than aimed at your post specifically:) Just a convenient hook upon which to hang my own bias. Sorry.

I think I'm having a bad day today. Perhaps I should go out and take a walk in the sunshine.

It's NOT a predisposition against readability, I just need to get this regex working to the point where I can migrate this from one platform to another. Besides, split forces me to iterate, and have logic to know which filter to run on each element of the inbound data..

I already said, I want to capture and validate in one pass

You've said it, but you've never said why. If you want to ask a question, don't be shocked by the answer. If you're doing it to learn, fair enough. But realize that most every other programmer would use split for it's succinctness. Moreover, I subscribe to the "every function can be explained by one sentence not using the word 'and'". You are trying to capture and validate. When something breaks, you've more debugging to do as you're trying to do two things at once.

thor