Not only possessive quantifiers, but also the  (?1) family of extended patterns were introduced with 5.10. However, the 'recursive parsing' trick can still be done with 5.8, so if 5.10/5.12 cannot be installed, check back here for more info. (But see Update below.)

(See Text::Balanced for all of the following functionality – and there's more!)

Following code requires 5.10+.

I find it useful to decompose regexes. (Closing sequence arbitrarily redefined to ']]' in example; could be any multi-character sequence.) 

>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $open  = '{{';
 my $close = ']]';
 ;;
 my $opener = qr{ \Q$open\E  }xms;
 my $closer = qr{ \Q$close\E }xms;
 my $body   = qr{ [^\Q$open$close\E] }xms;
 ;;
 my $regex = qr{
     (
     $opener
     (?:
     $body++
     |
     (?1)
     )*
     $closer
     )
     }xms;
 ;;
 my $s = 'xxx {{ foo {{ bar ]] baz ]] yyy {{ fee ]] zzz';
 ;;
 print qq{'$1'} while $s =~ m{ $regex }xmsg;
"
'{{ foo {{ bar ]] baz ]]'
'{{ fee ]]'

[download]

This approach breaks down when we alter the string being searched to
    my $s =
      'xxx {{ foo {{ bar ]] baz [OK] ]] [NO] yyy {{ fee ]] zzz';
producing the output
    '{{ bar ]]'
    '{{ fee ]]'
because of the presence of the substring '[OK]' having the character ']' from the closing sequence.

This problem can be fixed by changing the definition of  $body to
    my $body = qr{ (?! $opener) (?! $closer) . }xms;
which restores the output to the expected
    '{{ foo {{ bar ]] baz [OK] ]]'
    '{{ fee ]]'
again.

Update: Oh, what the heck... Here's the 5.8.9 version: 

>perl -wMstrict -le
"print qq{perl version $]};
 ;;
 my $opener = qr{ \{\{ }xms;
 my $closer = qr{ \]\] }xms;
 my $body   = qr{ (?! $opener) (?! $closer) . }xms;
 ;;
 use re 'eval';
 our $regex = qr{
   $opener
   (?: (?> $body+) | (??{ $regex }) )*
   $closer
   }xms;
 ;;
 my $s =
   'xxx {{ foo {{ bar ]] baz [OK] ]] [NO] yyy {{ fee ]] zzz';
 ;;
 print qq{'$1'} while $s =~ m{ ($regex) }xmsg;
"
perl version 5.008009
'{{ foo {{ bar ]] baz [OK] ]]'
'{{ fee ]]'

[download]

In reply to Re: ERROR ... nested quantifiers in regex by AnomalousMonk
in thread ERROR ... nested quantifiers in regex by ŞuRvīvőr

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