Dear JohnGG, tybalt89, Anonymous Monk, AnomalousMonk, and hv,

Thanks so much for your replies. I had never considered in-lining the string and then processing it as a file, but it's clearly a very elegant solution, not only by virtue of solving the problem but also making the code a lot clearer and easier to read and maintain. And to Anonymous, I was not aware of the technique that your code shows whereby capture buffer numbers are reused so that regardless of which alternative matched, the capture buffer numbers are still the same. Very cool. And thanks for the referral to Regex::Common, a good resource.

And to Anomalous, wow, thanks for the reference to the special backtracking control verbs, that's another new area for me to explore.

My understanding of how the voting works when there are multiple responders is that I click on the O++, O--, or O+=0 buttons to allocate points across the responders, and these are limited to awarding a single upvote, a single downvote, or a single nothing vote respectively, there's no mechanism for the OP to award 50% to one, 25% to another, and so forth. But other readers can come along, read through all of the responses, and add their single upvotes or downvotes, and eventually with enough additional readers chiming in, the distributions of 50%, 25%, etc. will emerge from the population of voters rather than from a single voter. And I guess that the box at the bottom of all of the posts labeled vote! is for awarding a point to the discussion as a whole if it seems meritorious. I'm still learning about how the voting system works.

Thanks again to all!