It's not easy to do this with regexes. You could do something like:

my $bal;
$bal = qr /[(]((?:(?>[^()]+)|(??{$bal}))*)[)]/;

my $func = qr /([a-zA-Z]\w*)\s*$bal/;

while (<>) {
    while (/$func/g) {
        print "Name: $1; arguments: $2\n"     
    }
}
[download]

but that doesn't find all of them either. Beside the obvious problem of iterating over the lines (thus failing to find calls spanning a newline), it will report keywords that are followed by parens, like if and while. It won't find recursive calls, for instance, if you have

    foo (bar ())
[download]

it will only report foo, and not bar. But the program will truly go haywire on calls like:

    foo ("(");
    bar (")))");
[download]

. Comments are great fun too:

    /* This works (really!) */
[download]

With great effort, this might be fixable, but why should you? With great effort, you would be able to replace your tire with toothpicks as well, but sometimes you have to acknowledge that other tools are better for the job at hand.

Abigail

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