This subroutines count the number of capturing parentheses in a compiled regular expression. Since the regexp is compiled, we know it's correct, and thus we only have to count the opening parentheses.

Update: added /s in the while condition.

Update: This other discussion led to a much better solution, so I commented out the original code.

#sub captures {
#    local $_ = shift;
#    croak "$_ is not a compiled regexp" unless ref eq 'Regexp';
#    my $n = 0;
#    while( /\G(?=.)/gcs ) {
#      /\G[^\\(]*/gc;     # ignore uninteresting stuff
#      /\G(?:\\.)*/gc;    # ignore backslashed stuff
#      /\G\(\?/gc;        # ignore special regexps
#      /\G\(/gc && $n++;  # a capturing (, count it!
#    }
#    $n;
#}

sub captures { ( @_ = '' =~ /(@{[shift]})??/ ) - 1; }

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In reply to Count capturing parentheses in a compiled regexp by BooK

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