Edward M. Perry wrote: > I thought we also wanted to match 'snowmen' while leaving 'snowwomen' > alone. If there is a single regex to do that, that would be _too_ much > fun :) i -think- this will do it: /((?!wo)..|^.?)men/i; we want: - the string 'men', - preceded by either: - two characters which are not 'wo', or - just one character, or - zero characters. here's the script and data i tested the regex with: while (<DATA>) { print if /((?!wo)..|^.?)men/i; } __DATA__ Some women walking. Some men walking. Woman is singular. Man is singular. Men is plural. There are men-working here. Dancing women prove sexist, news at 11. Snowmen are built by snowwomen. Omen! Y2K! Women usually know what they're talking about. Snowmen. Snowwomen. -- Steve Lane <sml@zfx.com> ==== Want to unsubscribe from Fun With Perl? ==== Well, if you insist... Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to ==== fwp-request@technofile.org