ok - let me start with, I did not completely understand the original regex's and your explanation helped me there. I changed the $delimiter section as you suggested.

My goal was to capture all fields implied in a tab-delimited line, as in something that would do the right thing when given this:

aabel    Allyn Abel            EL0        20030612182307    10.5.4.166
abeeman    Ali Beeman            EL1    ajens@ttsd.k12.or.us    200309
+02191509    10.8.0.219
[download]

There are actually 8 fields in both lines, based on the tabbing.

The problem with the previous code (sans the '| ($delimiter)' ) was that when I specified '\t' as a field seperator, the regex did not recognize multiple tabs correctly.

Ugh. and now that i go off and test this with the original module (because I was going to show you the problem exactly..), its working with the original regex. *sigh*

Perhaps reading Text::ParseWords caused me to clean up some code elsewhere that was causing the issue.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this.