Having expressed that wisdom myself, I blush to admit I expected to write a quick and dirty one-off for a job that -- while tedious -- I could have done in far less time manually, and, undoubtedly, were I familiar with the HTML::TreeBuilder or some of it's cousins, with one of those.

But the truly horrid html (tables nested in tables; etc.) also disinclined me to attack it with a tool that pretty much expects (and I understand it; pls correct me if this is wrong) more-or-less standards-compliant source.

In short, + + ; thank you ... but at this point, I'm far more interested in the apparently regex anomaly than in re-writing code that might get used as often as annually.