note ioannis The Internet is full of lexical analyzers, as this was one of the favorable hobbies before the arrival of html and windows widgets: you are re-inventing the wheel. How about lex(1), flex(1), or even a full parser like RecDescent (if you don't mind the slow speed.) <p> Lots of analyzers out there. Many parsers can also act as lexers, and some (rich) lexers like flex(1) can almost act like parsers. There is also a perl binding to flex(1) through my cpan module [dist://Parse::Flex]. 573152 573152