Thank you Monks, great points all!

As suggested by @Ken and @AnonymousMonk, let me elaborate the problem. The overall goal is to remove all types of brackets from 'noisy' text (e.g html content/tweets etc.), thereby 'sanitize' text. The brackets may appear in text in any number and in any form (edge cases), the idea is to remove content from within all non-overapping, longest-extending, balanced brackets regardless of their types. Strings that have unbalanced brackets can be ignored. Flanking characters of brackets may be among (\s or \. or \; or \: or \,).

The below script from Ken's & AnonymousMonk's suggestions works well if there is just one 'big' bracket, as:

Program:

####program.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Text::Balanced 'extract_bracketed';

my $delim = '([{<';
my $prefix = qr{[^\Q$delim\E]*};
my $string = 'The use of parentheses (indicates that the (writer [cons
+idered] the {information}) less <important—almost> an afterthought).'
+;
my @parts = extract_bracketed($string, $delim, $prefix);
$parts[2]=~s/\s*$//;
print WF1 "pattern:\'$parts[0]\'\n";
print WF1 "rightside of pattern:\'$parts[1]\'\n";
print WF1 "leftside of pattern:\'$parts[2]\'\n";
[download]

Output:

pattern:'(indicates that the (writer [considered] the {information}) l
+ess <important—almost> an afterthought)'
rightside of pattern:'.'
leftside of pattern:'The use of parentheses'
[download]

However, when another non-overlapping bracket appears in the string (e.g. '(use {of})') as shown below, the above script removes just one, as shown below:

$string = 'The (use {of}) parentheses (indicates that the (writer [con
+sidered] the {information}) less <important—almost> an afterthought).
+';

Output:
pattern:'(use {of})'
rightside of pattern:' parentheses (indicates that the (writer [consid
+ered] the {information}) less <important—almost> an afterthought).'
leftside of pattern:'The'
[download]

The desired output though should have the second bracket also removed, something along the lines:

Desired output:'The parentheses.';
Pattern1removed:'(use {of})'
Pattern2removed:'(indicates that the (writer [considered] the {information}) less <important—almost> an afterthought)'

How can such cases be addressed?

Thanks again your help!

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