Aye, I was thinking that if the "template" knew that there was a construct like "query:[ stuffstuffsstuff ]" that it could just absorb it and try to parse it separately in the perl block for that rule.

However, I'm concerned that "stuffstuffstuff" may need to deal with matching up square brackets and string literals that include brackets, to accurately find the end of the stuff and the close of the query.

It's much like the magic that Perl must use to identify the proper beginnings and endings of regular expressions in code, all while allowing weirdities like s###. (I hope my case ends up being simpler.)