Thanks all for the feedback.

Indeed Text::Balanced might be a better solution although the suggested code fails to recognize '(fff)' as a separate, third, item. (probably because the parenthesis have an unbalanced nested parenthesis)

In reply to Re^2: regex to parse (nested) parenthesis delimited string? by varian
in thread regex to parse (nested) parenthesis delimited string? by varian

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