standard unix regex uses the backslashed curly braces notation to indicate repeat ranges. perl regex doesn't use the backslashes. in other words use "m/A{3,4}/" in perl to match uppercase A, but only when it occurs 3 or 4 times consecutively. Just a note about the way the question is posed, which i've seen a lot. Don't close yourself off from the possibility of a non-regex solution being a better fit for the problem. Parsing can be done in many ways, especially so in perl. unpack and closure functions come to mind as possibilities. About the year in one of those fields being only two digits. in my opinion you should convert to four digit year, and maybe into a full date that's nicely later handled, e.g. 19700627. Making the transition early saves headaches later, if you're going to have to store the date in a DB or if you're ever going to have to calculate or even display it.