Thanks ... but my example is just one case (and a simplified one) of the general problem. I'm not looking for a way to parse this particular data line, I'm looking for a general technique for extracting a (possibly very long) group of fields from a tab-delimited text record. Any of the fields may or may not be empty for some particular record in the input, and I don't necessarily know the length (in fields) of the line -- though I can determine it at runtime and dynamically build the matching string, if that's what it comes to. All I know to begin with is the range of fields that I'm supposed to extract. The worst case would be to build a matching line that explicitly matches each field in the range, as you indicate. If this is the way it MUST be done, then that's what I'll probably do, but it SUCKS. Thus, my specific question: is there some way to capture ALL the matches to a numerically quantified group?

In reply to Re^2: How to capture quantified repeats? by whatever
in thread How to capture quantified repeats? by whatever

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