I read the caveat in the pickaxe about when the replacement is a string, but I don't understand this. (I'm sure it's working as designed, I just don't "get it".) What's going on here? "hello".gsub(/([aeiou])/,<\1>') => h<e>ll<o> "hello".gsub(/([aeiou])/,<\1>") => h<^A>ll<^A> ruby -v yields: ruby 1.7.2 (2002-06-29) [i386-mswin32] __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online, calculators, forms, and more http://tax.yahoo.com