note bart I'm not surprised. <c>\K</c> was [doc://perlrebackslash|added in perl 5.10] but with <c>-e</c> perl won't use any features that are so "recent". Try "-E" instead, at least, if you have perl 5.10 or later. <p>But, I don't think it will work, anyway. <c>/([><])([^\w])/</c> would fix every "<c></</c>" in your XML, and that just isn't right. 1018925 1018942