note tphyahoo the problem with this approach is that it erroneously accepts input such as <code> $_ = "<*2)FOO<2,1>,<*3>(SigB<8:0:2>,BAR),<*2>Siga<2:0>,Sigb<8,7,6,5,0>"; </code> (where the first < matches a ) <p> you really need a parser to do this kind of thing "right". 768859 768938