in reply to Removing with regexps

my $lemma = qr { (?(DEFINE) (?<pretag> \( [a-z] [-0-9a-z,]* \) \s*) (?<tag> \( [a-z]+ \) \s*) (?<arch> \( arch \) \s*) (?<count> \( [0-9]+ \) \s*)) (?&pretag)* (?&count) (?&tag)* (?&arch) (?&tag)* [^;]* (?:; (?! \s* (?:$ | (?&pretag)* (?&count))) [^;]*)* ; \ * }x; s/$lemma//g;