Thanks. By the way, the (?{}) functionality is listed as 'experimental' in the docs. But yes, hopefully it will remain because people like me want it. Also, $myobj->print is expected to be a subset of $myvar, in my case, so I can't do it the other way around. And, I was wrong, (?{}) does have the effect of escaping non-alphanumeric characters in the return value. Sean