ok, thanks for the reply.... after posting, i immediately realized that the first implementation snag would be differentiating the submatches of the include pattern from the submatches of the exclude pattern. so it may be more complicated than it first appears.

Apologies if this is documented elsewhere, but I scanned the thread and didn't see any mention of it. Is there any support for capturing submatches and re-using them as variables? i.e., in a (perl, for example) substition regex like s/My.Favorite.Show.*S(\d{2}).*E(\d{2})/Season $1, Episode $2/, the ...