need some regular expression help

[Mirco Wahab]

Thus spoke Diez B. Roggisch (on 2006-10-08 10:49):
> Certainly true, and it always gives me a hard time because I don't know
> to which extend a regular expression nowadays might do the job because
> of these extensions. It was so much easier back in the old times....

Right, in perl, this would be a no-brainer,
its documented all over the place, like:

   my $re;

   $re = qr{
            (?:
              (?> [^\\()]+ | \\. )
               |
             \( (??{ $re }) \)
            )*
            }xs;

where you have a 'delayed execution'
of the

  (??{ $re })

which in the end makes the whole a thing
recursive one, it gets expanded and
executed if the match finds its way
to it.

Above regex will match balanced parens,
as in:

   my $good = 'a + (b / (c - 2)) * (d ^ (e+f))  ';
   my $bad1 = 'a + (b / (c - 2)  * (d ^ (e+f))  ';
   my $bad2 = 'a + (b / (c - 2)) * (d) ^ (e+f) )';

if you do:

   print "ok \n" if $good =~ /^$re$/;
   print "ok \n" if $bad1 =~ /^$re$/;
   print "ok \n" if $bad2 =~ /^$re$/;


This in some depth documented e.g. in
http://japhy.perlmonk.org/articles/tpj/2004-summer.html
(topic: Recursive Regexes)

Regards

M.