Yes, the problem was the /g....I removed it and all was well.

I am trying to create a "natural language" parser, and a "real" sentence would have been something like

Fred bought the car
or
The car was bought by Fred

So I was searching for car and bought, but I thought /g would find the words globally through the text, regardless of position.

I apologize: I'm a real newbie with regular expressions; most of my Perl work has not involved any real searches to date, but that has now changed and I'm going through *that* chapter that I always kinda meant to get back to someday to figure out....

Thanks again!

Tacho