OK, I have what I need. I had several problems that I will confess for the record. While I don't think it compounded the problem, my misunderstanding of Perl's \n that tye corrected would, I'm sure, have slowed me down eventually. Second, I hadn't seen Perl's \r before, didn't recognise it at first and, for no good reason, started thinking that \n was 0D and \r was 0A. Third, I was flailing at demons and trying to sort out the \n and \r combinations in text, instead of working with hex or decimal character codes. This led to a fourth problem, namely that I was trying to resolve the difference between \n as a two character string and 0A which gets db->quoted to \n. Fifth, I was unsure about the workings of \n in regexes and tried to do it a way I understood instead of a way that worked.

My final solution is breathtakingly simple. s/\r\n/\n/g does everything I need. Even with the help I got here, it took the thick end of a day to unconfuse myself. I dread to think how long it would have taken on my own.

Plusses and kisses to all who helped! :-)

Regards,

John Davies

Update - much, much later. I continued to flail at demons even after posting the above. Strange things were happening that I could not explain and my database was not being updated. The regex I gave above, s/\r\n/\n/g, works provided there is only one line break, the case I was testing when I wrote my original query. What I really needed was s/\r\n/\n/gms to cover the case of three or more lines.