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Thank you.

Please try this instead:
(?!^([^“�\r\n]++|“[^“�\r\n]*�)*$)^.+
which puts less of a strain on the recogniser.

The revised RegEx worked beautifully. If I could possibly thank you enough, I would.

You're welcome. We're co-operating to give this new version a really good work-out.

One interesting note about the new RegEx. It works beautifully in 7.0.0,
but when I put it into RegEx Buddy with the PERL setting, I got back out a message: Perl does not support possessive quantifiers «+»

For the second "+" in the "++" sequence. It still worked in TextPad 7, though.

Possessive quantifiers were introduced into Perl in version 5.10, released in 2007.

What does RegEx Buddy have to say about this version:
(?!^(?>[^“�\r\n]+|“[^“�\r\n]*�)*$)^.+
which uses an "independent subexpression", which is what lies behind a possessive quantifier and stops backtracking?

It passed RegEx Buddy in Perl mode with flying colors. I also just tried it on the earlier file that caused problems and a new text I just received. It worked beautifully in both cases.

Thank you.

I checked the latest RegEx out in 7.0.4. No problems.

I've discovered I need to do the same gig as for curly quotes with straight quotes. Any suggestions? BTW, the curly quote regex is backed up on my systems. I occasionally look at it and mutter "My precious."

Do you mean you want to find all lines that contain an odd number of straight quotes?

The obvious alteration to my previous suggestion will do that:
(?!^([^"\r\n]++|"[^"\r\n]*")*$)^.+

As will:
(?!^[^"\r\n]+(?:"[^"\r\n]*"[^"\r\n]*)*$)^.+

The alteration wasn't obvious to me, I'm afraid. I can do a few things with regular expressions, RegEx 101 level. This stuff seems to be a lot higher level.

A thousand thanks.