sara--

it seems like the majority of your posts deal with regex questions, and so I thought you might like to have some reference material to look at. things like the /i modifier will be old hat if you take the time to read these things over. without further ado:

from the docs:

perlre

perlrequick

perlretut

from perlmonks tutorials:

String matching and Regular Expressions which continues on through several different useful nodes

pattern matching exercises are the exercises to go along with that regex tutorial

common regex gotchas is chromatic's addition to the regex tutorial, and I always find his writing very very helpful

finally, from the literature you might try:

chapters 7, 8, and 9 of merlyn's Learning Perl (3rd Edition) (AKA "the llama")

chapter 5 of Programming Perl (3rd edition) (AKA "the camel")

Mastering Regular Expressions (2nd edition). I haven't looked at this one myself, but I understand it's excellent, and the second edition has just recently come out

<update>

that DamnDirtyApe suggested that I add japhy's book. I'd never seen it, but plan to spend some time with it tonight. Thanks DDA!
</update>

I often find that having a list of resources all in once place can be a big help, and your question just gave me an excuse to put one together on this topic. There's certainly far more out there in terms of resources, but even just reading the documentation provided with your distribution of perl or the tutorials offered on this site should help you to feel a lot more confident with your regexes.

hope you look into these,
--au