in reply to another regx Q

Have you thought about doing:

# repeated part my $rp = qr!(-?\d+\.\d+E[-+]\d+)!; my $regex = qr!^(\d+)\s(\d\d):(\d\d):(\d\d)\s (\d\d)-(\w+)-(\d{4})\s(\d+)\s(\d+\s+\d+)\s $rp\s$rp\s$rp\s$rp\s$rp\s$rp\s$rp\s$rp\s$rp!x;

It takes out some redundancy. You could also use a loop/join instead of repeating $rp a bunch of times.

Just a thought.