[namely:]Either way, what about the alternative formattings that don't appear to need look-aheads?
And if it doesn't have an ordered list starting at 1, simply treat it like any normal list of strings.
Hm, could be a /bit/ tricky, but I think it's probably feasible, by just making _get_item_type even more horribly incestuous than it already is. I'll have a look at this soon.
-- Sean M. Burke http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/
