It appears that you were cut off in the middle of your post. Could you please repost? From what I can see, your regexes look very interesting and I suspect from your choice of variable names that your target text is rather unpredictable, which makes that regexes more interesting still. I very much would like to take a look at what you are trying to accomplish.

Also, wrapping your code in <CODE></CODE> tags will format it nicely: 

$np1="(?:$det|$gen)";
$np2 ="(?:$adj|$num|$conj|$adv|$inf)";
$np3="(?:$np1*\s*($noun)*\s*$np2*\s*($noun)+\s*$adj*)";

[download]
Cheers,
Ovid

In reply to (Ovid) Re: greedy and lazy by Ovid
in thread greedy and lazy by Anonymous Monk

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