in reply to Maximal match in a recursive regex

Ah I see. The key is to change the capturing group to match one or more times instead of just once. It just becomes )+ from ).

Added: I goofed. That is *part* of the key. The above change has a maximal match but loses the contents of the non-innermost matches. Here's a version that *works*

$re = qr/
    \[ # Opening bracket
    ((?: # Capture the contents 
        [^][]+ # Body of a link
        |
        (??{$re}) # Or recurse
    )+) # and allow repeats internally
    \] # Closing bracket
    /x;

[download]

Noted: for a brief period there was also some pushing into @f. That shouldn't have been posted so I removed it.

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Re: Re: Maximal match in a recursive regex
by Mr. Muskrat (Canon) on Jun 26, 2003 at 17:35 UTC

    This is how I fixed it.

    my $re;
$re = qr/
    \[ # Opening bracket
    ( # Capture the contents
        [^][]+ # Body of a link
        |
        (??{$re}) # Or recurse
    )+ # added per diotalevi's instructions
    \] # Closing bracket
    /x;

$k = "a[b[c[d]]";
$k =~ s/($re)/<$1>/g; # I added the ()'s :)
print $k;

    [download]

    Bah! It captures the outer square brackets too :(

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