Thanks. This is of interest.

I was aiming for a 5.8 solution: it was only after posting that I noticed ++ wasn't introduced until 5.10.0. Both the 5.8.8 and 5.18.2 doco show the same (??{ code }) example for matching (...), which I more or less copied for {...} and [...], so I wasn't too concerned about the experimental warnings for that bit.

I noticed that SimonPratt had hinted at a (?PARNO) solution (in Re^3: Regular expressions: Extracting certain text from a line) and I did look into that yesterday; although, I didn't spend a huge amount of time on it. Like you, I'm not really across (DEFINE): I'll spend a bit more time looking at this in concert with your code.

I ran the four tests under 5.18.1. The two you'd marked as # works passed all tests for me; the other two (# no) both failed tests 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 with $got->[0] = Does not exist in every case.

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