Hi Jethro, Thanks a lot for the useful reply. I will follow your advice and also try the script. I also just came up with this script and it worked. Any comments on it? (i would really appreciate it!!) 
#!usr/bin/perl 

my $FILENAME4 = "organized.txt";
open(DATA2, $FILENAME4);

#remove all previous re-organized files
my $remove_reorganized = "re-organized.txt";
if (unlink($remove_reorganized) == 1) {
                        print "Existing \"re-organized.txt\" file was 
+removed\n";
                          }
     
#now make a file for the ouput
       my $outputfile = "re-organized.txt";
           if (! open(POS, ">>$outputfile") ) {
            print "Cannot open file \"$outputfile\" to write to!!\n\n"
+;
                exit;
        }

while (my $organized = <DATA2>) {
        
#do some re-organizing
#sort out the group numbers first

$organized =~ s/(\w+)[^(^\d+)(\s)]/z/g;
my $organized2 = $organized;
$organized2 =~ s/z(\d+)/z/g;

print POS $organized2;   
}

[download]
Thanks, $new_guy

In reply to Re^2: regular expessions question: (replacing words) by $new_guy
in thread regular expessions question: (replacing words) by $new_guy

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