BlaisePascal actual hit it on the head. I'm not sure what drugs I was on Saturday to so blindly accept what you said. What I've really got is input from RecDescent parsed language. One of the things that I accept in my language is a "perl pattern match". For conveniece sake, I want to permit the user to specify whatever delimeters they want. Then, one or more patterns are joined to together, and I let perl regex engine do the hard work. I think tilly's suggestion of qr// is probably the right call. I can apply that "early on", and know that the escaping in the RE has been properly applied.