If you don't expect to be dealing with particularly long and complex strings, it should be sufficient to loop deleting contents from the inner parens outwards:

  1 while $string =~ s/\([^(]*?\)//gs;
[download]

(Note that the simpler pattern s/\(.*\)// will not do the right thing on a string like "a(b)c(d)e", since it will remove the "c" as well. And you can't fix that by making the .* a minimal .*?, since that fails on nested parens.)

With long strings this approach will start to suffer from the need to repeatedly scan from the beginning of the string for each level of nesting, and then you may be better of with a solution that does a single pass over the string with Regexp::Common::balanced. However the additional complexity of the balanced paren matcher makes it a lot slower, so it won't be a win unless the string is really long or has parens nested quite deeply.

Hugo

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.