Looks like I wasn't specific enough in my writeup. Yes, you can put a "^" anchor in the top-level invocation of $re, but not in the $re itself. For the OP's original problem, where he is looking for the innermost parenthesese that are not inside a quote, you want the "^L in the $re. If you don't put it there, the invocation of $re from within the first invocation of $re can just skip over text to find the parentheses within the quotes. However, "^" doesn't do what you need there, because it doesn't mean the beginning of where $re was invoked in each recursive iteration, it means the beginning of this invocation of the regex parser. At least that's what it looks like from the behavior.

In reply to Re^3: A regexp to parse nested brackets containing strings by rodion
in thread A regexp to parse nested brackets containing strings by dfaure

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