Thank you a thousand thousand times, grinder! Your note about using non-greedy regexes (seems obvious in hindsight) reduced some of my large text file parse script runtimes by roughly 70%. I was searching very generally for speeding up large regex operations and, as much as my eyes were starting to glaze over, you managed to clearly communicate a rather simple yet important concept without being obtuse or pedantic. If only more searches resulted in such education. :) /salute