The others have already given you some excellent answers. I just wanted to point out Regexp::Common::delimited as well as Text::Balanced, which contain functions that implement something like what you are doing. Also, this task sounds like something that one encounters when parsing formats for which parsers might already exist, a common one being Text::CSV. Also, personally I find it easier to write my regex tests as I showed in Re: How to ask better questions using Test::More and sample data.

In reply to Re: Using negative lookahead by haukex
in thread Using negative lookahead by ibm1620

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