This code wasn't really intended to be a serious method of dealing with this problem since it is innapropriate here. For many situations, my beloved regexes can't match the power of Text::Balanced or other solutions, but for some sick reason, I view them as a fun logic puzzle :)

In retrospect, I should have just put this in seekers and just asked monks how they would approach the . problem. The above comments about the limitation of this approach were correct. I just want to figure out how to get rid of that frickin' dot! merlyn's proposal (which he acknowledged was untested) didn't pan out:

$middle = "(?:(?!$left|$right|$escape$left|$escape$right).)";
[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

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