bob.aldrich: > but I would like it to fail if it finds a closing “/style” tag, before it finds the “refStyle” , > I was hoping the {1} would limit the result to just include the reference to style> only once.    Here is a quick script. Thanks for attaching the input sample - makes it ...

  You should consider biterscripting ( http://www.biterscripting.com ) . It is great for parsing.  Just read the file into a string variable, then parse it away using any of their stream editor commands.  var str input ; "file.txt > $input To get everything upto the first dot (.), usestex "]^.^1" ...

   Noel: Should use biterscripting ( http://www.biterscripting.com ) for EDI. Here is how I would forumate a solution.   The tilde (~) separates "words" or entries. So let's set the word separator to tilde. set $wsep = "~"   You are looking to extract words - second, third, fourth and fifth. ...

Excellent advice so far.  Here is a slightly different approach using biterscripting  (http://www.biterscripting.com for free download). The wex (word extractor) command extracts words from a string. The characters that separate words are specified in the system variable $wsep. $wsep is by default set to ", " etc. so your ...

  In Windows environment, I have been using biterscripting for parsing and searching using regular expressions. They have placed a good example at http://www.biterscripting.com/Download/SS_FindRE.txt that extracts lines that match a Regular Expresion in a multitude of files. Also, one good thing biterscripting does is that it allows you to ...