note stefp I beg to differ. My general principle is to be lax on what I receive and strict on what I emit. So I try to write my regexen as lax as possible and to "synchronize" my match on characters/sequences I am sure will be present in the input. This means that I often use <code>.*?</code> in my regexen. Using the greedy counterpart will lead to a lot of backtracking and more so geometrically with the number of <code>.*?</code>. Also I incrementally build my regexen testing them on samples: non greedy match also is less a nuisance here when examining the matches.<p> <i>Regexen are a tricky art</i> and I like to <a href="http://paris.mongueurs.net/assombri/opc3/Stephane_Payrard.tar.gz"> abuse</a> it at (*) the risk of being called <a href="http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1336/sam03030015/">demented</a>. (*) And I beg to disagree with Felix Gallo, France is the lang of semiology, not of semiotics... and hair splitting too, BTW. And, on a related field, the main tagmemics foray in France is collateral to the introduction of american camelides but has yet to appear widely in French. <a href="">tagmemique</a> is indeed French neologism that googlewhacks until the present node referencing of a node <p> -- <a href="/index.pl?node=stefp&lastnode_id=1072"> stefp</a> (qui aime couper les cheveux en quatre)-- check out <a href="http://texmacs.org">TeXmacs</a> <a href="http://alqua.com/tmresources/">wiki</a> 179555 179644