Nice to see code. :-) Perl 5.10 from 2007 supports named captures. (Google confirmed that.) Edit: nikic in the parallel comment is correct, named captures are

Nice to see code. :-) Perl 5.10 from 2007 supports named captures. (Google confirmed that.) Edit: nikic in the parallel comment is correct, named captures are affected the same way in Perl's regexp engine with ?|. (Google perlre and search for ?|.)