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Message: [QUOTE="Mirco Wahab, post: 4834332"] I was under the impression your data would not only consist of /one/ record but rather a good sequence of them, so the regex would need to climb down (find) the records and spit out the correct matches, # Example: four record thing with "offending" structure ==> my $morestuff=' ALWAYSPRESENT:0008:0:PRESENT PRESENT MAYBEPRESENT Some Text 1:0000:0:More Text 1 Some Text 2:0000:0:More Text 2 Text22 text22 text22 Some Text 3:0000:0:More Text 3 Text3 text3 Text33 text33 text33 '; # and so on ... # Now, the regex should identify them # and step along ==> my $rg = qr/ \s* ^([^:]+) : \d+ : \d+ : ([^\n]+)?\n (?: ^([^:\n]+?) \n)? (?: ^([^:\n]+?) (?:\n|$) )?/mx; # This was the "shortest" thing I could find so # far (within your constraints), the record- # walking would be within a while ==> while( $morestuff =~ /$rg/g ) { printf "%s %s\n\t%s\n\t%s\n", $1||'undef', $2||'undef', $3||'undef', $4||'undef'; } # ... which would give the correct matches. Maybe I misunderstood your problem somehow, but I found the task quite nice and interesting (maybe somebody would write down a really simple regular expression for that - (not me, sleeping time now in this country ;-). Regards Mirco [/QUOTE]