I've been fighting this for several days and it is a very simple regular expression problem that should be easy enough for a second grader but I can't seem to get it to work. The string I am interested in testing for starts with 5 or 6 digits in a row and all I need to do is determine that the first 5 or 6 characters are numbers Period. That's all. For some reason, it has never passed the test. #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use warnings::unused; use File::Copy; #main local variables my $workname = '106787pdtb'; my $regextest = '/^\d+\{5,\}/'; if ( $workname =~ $regextest ) { print "yes\n"; } $workname contains the data I am testing. $regextest is the test for the first 6 characters. I was able to do this the hard way and test with 6 \d's as in my $regextest = '\d\d\d\d\d\d'; if ($workname =~ $regextest) {print "yes\n"; } I got a yes that time but that's not good enough. I'll probably kick myself when I find out what I am missing, but I can't seem to get this to work. Thank you. Martin McCormickThread Next