Hi, I'm writing some Perl and want to match a string with 4 @ signs = separated by a variable number of characters. Currently I'm trying: /@.*?@.*?@.*?@/ Which is not matching the strings properly. Has anyone any idea what's = wrong? More importantly has anyone got a way of fixing it? :) Sample strings to test on are: @@@@ one@two@three@four@ @a@b@c@d Cheers. Robert.