Thanks, but I guess I did not make it clear - this is a utility script that extracts transactions from an archive based on the regular expressions I give it at run time. That's all it does - extracts transactions to a file.

/PV1\|1\|O\|(.*?\|){3}\|/ was one of several regexes evaluated by itself. If all are true, the transaction is extract to an output file.

I know about anchors - PV1 segments are a ways into the transaction as I showed in the sample, so I could not use an anchor.

The parentheses are used for the repeat factor. All my research on the internet indicates a multi-character pattern that needs to be repeated multiple times should be enclosed in parentheses. Is this not correct?

In reply to Re^2: Selecting HL7 Transactions by BillDowns
in thread Selecting HL7 Transactions by BillDowns

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