You're right that Text::Balanced isn't very useful like this, i can't imagine that the author meant it to be this way.

You can see what i'm trying to do (well, actually i'll be parsing a href links out in an effort to combat chatroom spambots), is there another method you'd suggest?

It was looking at the docs that convinced me that Text::Balanced was the right thing for me... i'd be using the 5th (#4) element.. i haven't found another lib that'll supply just the stripped URL inside the tag yet... and while Perl seems super-cool for text handling (i'm a duffer), i'd rather not rewrite the wheel..

in any case, thanks very much for your reply!