PS. If you see this, would you please tell me what shabba stands for? :)

shabba is excited utterance -- heard it on the radio decades ago ; could have been the Jamaican dancehall musician, could have been fresh prince/jazzy jeff, or some local dj or ...

but it took the place of "woo hoo" or "dang it" or "booyah" ... "mahalo" (hello and goodbye)

and now I use it in place of Frobnicate / NotDemoMeaningfulName / YouChangeIt / iAmSleepyWhenIcopyFAQ

Version 2013030901 Sat Mar  9 14:51:42 CET 2013
+ Use (?-1) instead of (??{ }) for the recursive balanced pattern.
  This makes the pattern unavailable for pre-5.010 perls.
[download]

So solution is simple, on any computer you have, get the old version, print out the pattern and save it to a file

cpanm -n http://cpan.metacpan.org/authors/id/A/AB/ABIGAIL/Regexp-Common-2011121001.tar.gz

$ perl -MRegexp::Common -le " print $RE{balanced}{-parens=>'<>'} "
(?^:(?^:(?:\<(?:(?>[^\<\>]+)|(??{$Regexp::Common::balanced [0]}))*\>))
+)
[download]

So to inline into above program you'd write something like

 
use vars qw/ $re_balanced_angles /;
our $re_balanced_angles = qr{(?^:(?^:(?:\<(?:(?>[^\<\>]+)|(??{ $re_bal
+anced_angles }))*\>)))}; 
...

        m{
### no more ## \G( $allowed )( $RE{balanced}{-parens=>'<>'} )
\G( $allowed )( $re_balanced_angles )
        }gcsx and do {
[download]

Or downgrade the version of Regexp::Common you upload to your website

Dear Anonymous Monk, it appears this will not work in Perl 5.8.8. The ?^ returns an error too. I will have to give up on this for now, since I can't convince my webhost to upgrade their default Perl to the minimum Regexp::Common requires. Thank you for your work, I am just sorry I can't use it.

No matter how hysterical I get, my problems are not time sensitive. So, relax, have a cookie, and a very nice day!
Lady Aleena

Dear Anonymous Monk, it appears this will not work in Perl 5.8.8. The ?^ returns an error too.

Well, sorry about that, I forgot about that (5.16 is my first perl in path), thats just the way it stringifies on the newer perls, you can simply ditch the ^

With actual 5.8.8 it stringifies as

(?-xism:(?-xism:(?:\<(?:(?>[^\<\>]+)|(??{$Regexp::Common::balanced [0]
+}))*\>)))
[download]

So here is the updated file, test still pass, with actual 5.8.8 too :)

Read more... (5 kB)