Thank you so much for your "helpful suggestion".

Incidently I own Learning Perl, Programming Perl, The Perl Cookbook and am currently slogging through Mastering Regular Expressions.

I am not interested in having people write code for me but in understanding what the code is doing. "Give a man a fish..." and all that.

Posting here broke the logjam on my problem. I came looking for a solution to one problem and was given an alternative approach. I'll probably still go back and try to clean up my regex to see why behavior in one program differed from behavior in another.

In the mean time I can complete my "before the end of the month" project for a client so I'll have more free time for reading studying etc. Darned inconvenient this working for a living. It gets in the way of enlightenment.