Ah, I just found a way! Wrapping the metacharacters in a character class prevents the meta-character confusion: 
warn Dumper extract_tagged(
  '[*][*]'
  '[*][*]'
);

[download]
Spits out 
$VAR1 = '**bold words**';
$VAR2 = '';
$VAR3 = '';
$VAR4 = '**';
$VAR5 = 'bold words';
$VAR6 = '**';

[download]
as it's supposed to. Still, if someone has got a better way to do it, I'd be happy to hear it.

In reply to Re: Extracting multiple-asterisk-delimited substring with Text::Balanced by kba
in thread Extracting multiple-asterisk-delimited substring with Text::Balanced by kba

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