in reply to \G anchor useage

I cannot understand what it is you're trying to accomplish. What are you trying to use \G for? Could you explain your input and output formats better?

One mistake I can see, though, is that you have {,$min} as a quantifier. That's not a valid quantifier: you need a leading 0 in there. {0,$min}.

Oh, another mistake: \b is only a word boundary outside of a character class. Inside a character class, it matches a backspace.

_____________________________________________________
Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart