As to your question, if you're having to go through a whole bunch of hoops and nested captures and what not it's probably a sign that just regexen aren't going to be the best solution to the problem. You probably want to aim more at writing an actual parser and use simpler regexen to break the string into tokens.

Also you say this is a learning exercise but be aware it's a solved problem (Geo::METAR).

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.

In reply to Re: Speeding up a large regex match pattern by Fletch
in thread Speeding up a large regex match pattern by wossname

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