>>>>> "C" == Christian Kaiser <chk / online.de> writes: C> Maybe I need some good literature on that to find out where and when such a C> thing could happen. Well, you have perhaps the best case : what you must see is that the regexp engine want really, really match, and for this it will try all combinations possibles. In some case (regexp with combination of more than one quantifier) it will take exponential time to try all possibilities and you just need to be patient :-) Guy Decoux