Thanks for the fast replies everyone!

Yeah I realise this METAR thing has been done many times and in many ways. I am merely using it as a means to test my knowledge of regular expressions.

I have no real use for a METAR processor script but the huge amount of freely available data combined with the significant complexity of the protocol make it an ideal case study for learning the ropes, as it were.

I'm interested in the links that you kindly posted though. I think I'll probably finish my "hard way" METAR script first and then I'll try it again using a proper parser. That way I think I'll get the benefit from both coding the logic manually and also taking a more high level approach.

Thanks again.

Wosser.

I'm so glad I found perlmonks.org, this place is a far more substantial knowledge base than anywhere else I've found.