in reply to Pattern Matching Confusion

If you are only looking for any item that is 58 characters long among XML tags, you could use the following regular expression:

/>[a-zA-Z0-9 ]{58}</

And forget about passing in a search string as a command line argument.

In this case it may or may not be useful to actually parse the XML, but you might explore XML::Simple to see if it would help you here.

--DrWhy

"If God had meant for us to think for ourselves he would have given us brains. Oh, wait..."