Thanks, halley! I'm going to look more closely at the e modifier. I think it would have helped me in another situation I had a while ago. I downloaded and printed perlre, perlop, and perlretut, and will put them in a "bathroom binder", complete with it's own highlighter so I can find the important stuff later on. I've already found something in perltut that I think will be very helpful for future reference when I'm trying to figure out what I did - the x modifier. I always thought it referred to more regexps and since I have enough trouble dealing with the basic ones I just ignored it. Who knew? Thanks for the insight!