Hi all, I brought this up on PCRE2 (at <https://github.com/PhilipHazel/pcre2/issues/15>), but the author rightfully pointed out that it's something Perl doesn't do. 1. The (minor) problem is that a regular expression cannot begin directly with a naming group, it must be parenthesised. This makes expressions that use named patterns produce result sets that are 1 item longer than necessary, and contain a duplicate member (0 and 1). It is more pronounced when using the "g" modifier, because iterating the matches then has multiple 0 groups that cannot be addressed using a semantic name. 2. The proposed syntax is to allow a pattern like /?<name>.../ rather than requiring /(?<name>...)/ 3. The benefits are consistent semantic access of match result members, and smaller result sets. I'm sure results are already memory-efficient with named and numbered groups pointing to the same data, but they have more output when examined or used. 4. From basic testing with PCRE, expressions that begin with ? fail to compile, but I'm not certain that's the case for all regexp usage in Perl. It looks like a backwards-compatible change. Regards, Roy.Thread Next