note kennethk Okay, much better. Assuming you want to do this in the midst of a script and not just piping one liners about, I would use more operations rather than be super sparse on characters. First, since you have a string that is internally-delimited by newlines, you can use <c>.</c> to match any character that is not a new line. This means you can actually grab your line using <c>$cdp =~ m/(.*0x01.*)/</c>, storing the line in <c>$1</c>. You could then [doc://split] that on whitespace and grab the 8th field with <c>(split /\s+/, $1)[7]</c>. So collecting all your 8th field matches: <c>my @switch; while ($cdp =~ m/(.*0x01.*)/g) { push @switch, (split /\s+/, $1)[7]; } </c> If this is not your intent and the way forward is unclear, post explicit desired output so the goal is clear. <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-712372"> <hr /> <p>#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.</p> </div></div> 1007760 1007767