Re: initializing internal regex variables?

[moritz]

My guess (which may be completely wrong) is that some state variables used by the regular expression engine are not being reinitialized upon subsequent displays of the table

If these tables are built in different HTTP requests, and you really use CGI as you wrote (and not FastCGI or mod_perl), then each of these requests is handled in a different process. There's no way an internal variable can accidentally be persistent across two processes, unless your OS is really buggy.

Any insight you may have which explains this odd behavior would certainly be appreciated.

Chances are that on subsequent requests the table is different, and your regex therefore works differently.

I recommend not to build the table wrongly, and then correct it later on, but instead build it in its desired form straight away.