On 28/07/06, Eric Armstrong <Eric.Armstrong / sun.com> wrote: > So it would appear that something strange is happening > in the evaluation of the gsub replacement string. That's right. The replacement string understands back-references of the form \1, \2 etc, so there's another level of escaping needed. "\\" <- one backslash "\\\\" <- two backslashes "\\\\\\\\" <- four backslashes, or two backslashes in replacement string Paul.