in reply to newbie parsing question

[^"]+matches one or more of chars that is not '"'.
$TheLine = 'REFERENCE "z:/bin/JAnalyzer/Justice Analyzer Users Guide.p +df" "package/Justice Analyzer Users Guide.pdf"'; $TheLine =~ /(\S*)\s+"([^"]+)"\s+"([^"]+)"\s*/; print "1 is $1 and 2 is $2 and 3 is $3\n";
Does this do what you want?