I wrote the following code, trying to match balanced parentheses with a given ending. It produces a strange result of '(1, 2)', while I am expecting '(4, 5)'. Would someone tell me what is going wrong? I am using ActivePerl 5.10.0 build 1004.
use strict; my $a = '(0,((1,2),3,(4,5),6),7,8)'; my $tail = qr{5\)}; my $matching_parens = qr{ ( # paren group 1 (parens) \( (?: (?> [^()]+ ) # Non-parens without backtracking | (?1) # Recurse to start of paren group 1 )* \) ) .* (?<= $tail ) }x; $a =~ /$matching_parens/; print "$1\n";

In reply to Strange regex result by ThreeMonks

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.