From what little you've said it would appear you want to get rid of everything after a bunch of '+'s appear.   How about just   s/\+{3,}.*$//;  .   We say to find the trailing part of the string that starts with at least three '+'s and throw away that and everything from there to the end of string.   If you want to throw away everything after even only two pluses, e.g. '++', you'd change the quantifier to {2,} or even change it to the more obvious   s/\+\+.*$//;