Good gracious thor, you'd think what I am asking for is a crime against humanity. I already said, I want to capture and validate in one pass (of an ARBITRARY length). TWMTODI anyone? I asked in the hope of expanding my knowledge of regex's on the whole..

It's NOT a predisposition against readability, I just need to get this regex working to the point where I can migrate this from one platform to another. Besides, split forces me to iterate, and have logic to know which filter to run on each element of the inbound data..