Thank you -- I think you've nailed it.

I'd never thought about using a character-at-a-time approach as you did to handle the first problem. I just assumed it would be much less efficient than trying to use [[:word:]]+, for example. But there's probably no basis for that assumption. (Premature optimization!) That could make it easier in the future for me to tackle these complicated scenarios.

I use v5.34.1, and will take a look at regex_sets.

In reply to Re^2: Problem with a text-parsing regex by ibm1620
in thread Problem with a text-parsing regex by ibm1620

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