Hey, thanks. That helped to clarify it a bit. I actually was not aware of the ( match ) [ index ] syntax. I tried some similar stuff but never got it quite right, and wondered if I was still in the right ballpark at all.

That's pretty much what I was looking for in the clean practical solution that I suspected the existence of. Also yeah thanks for pointing out my typing gaffe with the @awesome. And the doc:// shortcuts are great to know about, actually I see that there are a lot of interesting things happening in that section.

I am still curious about the guts of it, ie what you mentioned in your second update, but will for now simply accept that perl works in mysterious ways. Thanks again!