I finally got the time to get perl installed and ive worked out what is wrong. It seems that pos isn't updated when the look ahead assertion is matched. So even though the " was matched the next match on /g didnt start _after_ the second quote, but _at_ the second quote. Thus the odd behaviour of treating the second unquoted section as if it were quoted. Or at least thats how I read this. All very interesting. Thanks for the repeated feedback...

:-)