> It was my impression that .*?\| would match anything to the next vertical bar, which is what ^*?\| does.

exactly anything starting from the left including other delimiters, till you have the empty cell between two delimiters you are looking for! :)

just test it: (with semicolons as delimiters to simplify the regex)

  DB<112> $x=';a;not;b;not;c;;'
 => ";a;not;b;not;c;;"

  DB<113> print $x =~ /;(.*?);;/
a;not;b;not;c
  DB<114> print $x =~ /;([^;]*?);;/
c

[download]

clearer now?

Cheers Rolf

( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

In reply to Re^2: Selecting HL7 Transactions by LanX
in thread Selecting HL7 Transactions by BillDowns

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