in reply to Re^3: Search for consecutive flush left curly braces
in thread Search for consecutive flush left curly braces

OK, you’re wrong. SCNR. :-)

First off, for the reason given by QM, this regex doesn’t prevent a match if there is a { character between } characters:

2:57 >perl -wE "my $s = '}abc{def}'; say 'match' if $s =~ /}.*(?!{)}/ +;" match 2:59 >

Second, there is no non-greedy match here: .* is greedy. But making it non-greedy doesn’t help:

2:59 >perl -wE "my $s = '}abc{def}'; say 'match' if $s =~ /}.*?(?!{)} +/;" match 2:59 >

A negated character class is what is needed:

3:31 >perl -wE "my $s = '}abc{def}'; say 'match' if $s =~ /}[^{]*?}/; +" 3:31 >perl -wE "my $s = '}abc|def}'; say 'match' if $s =~ /}[^{]*?}/; +" match 3:31 >

Hope that helps,

Update: Tweaked the third code snippet.

Athanasius <°(((><contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

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Re^5: Search for consecutive flush left curly braces
by stevieb (Canon) on Jun 10, 2015 at 17:54 UTC

    Thanks... The lack of the non-greedy quantifier was a typo. I thought I was getting a grasp on the lookaheads so back to the drawing board it is! :)