Um, if we had single-character delimiters, then the suggestion in Death to Dot Star would apply; use a negated character class in place of "dot": 

    m# \[ [^\]]* \] #x

[download]
but that isn't the case here.

If you are wanting me to do that complex trick to avoid matching a closing (or even opening) delimiter in the middle, then I don't think you read the thread. Lots of good people tried and failed to get it right. I don't recommend doing that trick since I've never seen it proposed (even by amazing people) without someone finding an error in it.

Plus, it wouldn't gain us anything in this case. If I see an opening delimiter in this situation, I want to force the match to start there. It would be an error to have extra, unmatch starting delimiters. We aren't trying to parse English here.

As for matching nested blocks, that pretty much violates the original design. For defensive programming, I'd probably have the expand() routine look for and warn of opening delimiters in the match string since these might indicate that a closing delimiter was dropped or munged. But to be completely defensive would require more work than that.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

In reply to (tye)Re2: Template system and substitution by tye
in thread Template system and substitution by Anonymous Monk

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