The only method that supports arbitrary strings is the last one, as I demonstrated.

Does 
    /[^'"\\]+|(?!\1)['"]­/

[download]
do the same thing as 
    /(?!\1)[^\\]/

[download]
?

No. But /[^'"\\]|(?!\1)['"]­/ (note that I removed the "+") and /(?!\1)[^\\]/ are the same (provided \1 is either "'" or '"'). That is, they each match a single character that is not a backslash (\), nor the same as the quote character in \1.

Since the regex is matching zero or more occurrences of X or Y or Z, it also works to match zero or more occurrences of X or Y+ or Z.

Replacing Y with Y+ means we can grab tons of "uninteresting" characters quickly so that we don't have to loop through the surrounding (?: ... )* so many times (since we've seen that we are only allowed to loop through it 32k times).

                - tye

In reply to Re: regex bottom line? (bottom method) by tye
in thread Text::ParseWords regex doesn't work when text is too long? by edan

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