as a rule, please always clarify what "doesn't seem to work" means -- e.g. what did you expect to get? what did you actually get?

that aside, it looks like it's just a matter of case -- the a-z is just lower case letters, but your data has upper case.. to fix this, either do [a-zA-Z] or add the /i modifier.

One other issue -- you have [^a-z] -- that caret in there actually negates the character class, so what it means is NOT a letter (but you're right that the /^ matches the beginning of the string)..

so altogether, try: /^[A-Z]+([0-9]+)/i; You might also consider /^\w+(\d+)/ (note this will accept underscores as well as letters) -- see perlre for \w and \d ...