Right, I'm still too new to regular expressions to make head or tails of this, but with enough time I'll be able to parse it. At the moment I'm just hoping to get something that works so that I can meet my deadline; after that I'll be able to focus on the actual learning.

I'm noticing now that this new code is calling pairs matches that shouldn't be, such as 'baa' and 'bbb'. These shouldn't match because there are two positions where the words differ. I think I have enough correct matches to finish the puzzle I'm working on, so I wouldn't call it urgent, but soon it will be an important thing for me to look at and figure out.