note AnomalousMonk <blockquote><i> The following regex worked properly. ... If there is a better way to do this ... </I></BLOCKQUOTE> <p> Even after adding (just for the heck of it) a closing <c> } </C> brace, all I get is an infinite loop. What code are you running? </P> <c> >perl -wMstrict -le "my $string=\"AAABBBCCCCDDDEEEFFFGGGHHHIII\"; my @patterns=('BBB','DDD'); my @index; foreach(@patterns){ while($string=~m/\G([A-Z]{3})+?$_/g){ push(@index,$-[2]); pos($string)=$-[2]; print 0+@index; <STDIN>; } } " 1 2 3 4 5 ... Terminating on signal SIGINT(2) </C> 948417 948423