snippet belg4mit While searching for a parse of ASCII bulleted lists the other day, I ended up rolling my own: <p> <code>while( $text =~ /\G\s*($bullet)\s*([^\n]+)((?:\s*$bullet{2,}\s*[^\n]+)+)?/g ){ ...} </code> </p> And stumbled across what I believed to be a clever use of [perldoc://qr] to create $bullet from a separate data structure (which permits us to later determine what style of bullet we had, and map it to something): <CODE> %bullets = ('*'=>'foo', '+'=>'bar', '@'=>'qux'); #Original, which as ikegami points out, doesn't quite work #my $bullet= sprintf(qr/[%s]/, join('', keys %bullets)); #Alternate form, that I was trying to make more scrutable, with added \Q my $bullet= qr/[\Q@{[join '', keys %bullets]}\E]/; </CODE>