Since this bug was reported 10 months ago, I'm not sanguine about it being fixed any time soon and I need to solve this problem now. Either I can decide not to use the Regexp::Common regex for this one match or I can force the regex to fail. The former option is the one I'm going with, but I was curious as to why my code to force the regex to fail didn't work (note that what follows has some extra stuff, but it mirrors exactly what I need).

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

use Regexp::Common;

use constant SUCCEED => qr{(?=)};
use constant FAIL    => qr{(?!)};

my $QUOTED = $RE{quoted};
my $NUM    = $RE{num}{real};

my $VALUE  = do {
    use re 'eval';
    qr/(?:$QUOTED|$NUM)(??{'.' eq $+ ? FAIL : SUCCEED})/;
};

my $text = 'name => "foo", fav.num => 3';
my @text = split /($VALUE)/ => $text;
print Dumper \@text;
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That prints:

$VAR1 = [
  'name => ',
  '"foo"',
  ', fav',
  '.',
  'num => ',
  '3'
];
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What I want it to print is:

$VAR1 = [
  'name => ',
  '"foo"',
  ', fav.num => ',
  '3'
];
[download]

Because of the nature of the code (using the lexer from Higher Order Perl's chapter 8, if you're curious), I can't change how the split line operates. I pass regexes to the split and I need the regex to fail at that time. Can anyone help fix the first regex or tell me why my attempt at failing it is broken? (I've also tried the $^N variable, but no love.) I'd prefer to fix my code as I'd like to rely on the Regexp::Common module, but I also know that I'm using experimental features.

Or maybe there's something really simple that I haven't seen.