in reply to Help for regex

If all you really want to do is remove the tags, this should be enough:
my $string = "-<ID>A8W11200031</ID>"; $string =~ s/<.+?>//g; print $string . "\n";
Ofcourse, if your actual input contains other tags than what your sample input shows, you'll get funny results.

-- Time flies when you don't know what you're doing