Forgive me for being impertinent, but whose idea was it to define a format like this?

If you have control over that aspect of the design, and if it's not too late to think it over and try again, I would certainly recommend that you just change the design to something that's easier to handle. Of course, if the values of tags can really be any sort of Perl regex, then it might be challenging to come up with something really bullet-proof. Even so, a format like "tag:=:value" is bound to avoid a lot of problems, because you'll have a delimiter that is likely to be distinctive and unambiguous in the vast majority of cases.

In reply to Re: Regex dynamics by graff
in thread Regex dynamics by Hena

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