Re: requiring balanced parens in a regexp?

Hi John,


Peter Michaux wrote:
> > Can JavaScript regular expressions ensure that all
> > parentheses to the right of "test" are closed before proclaiming a
> > match? If so how? If not must I walk through the string counting how
> > nested each character is?
>
> [Matching parentheses is the classic problem that pure regexp's cannot
> solve, because they have no way to count the number of unmatched
> parens. There's a variety of ways to fake it, e.g., take your string,
> replace each ([^)]+) by a space until there aren't any left, then look
> for your match. Or use various extended regexps that are more like
> parsers. -John]


Thanks for the info. My problem is even bigger as there might be mixed
quotes with various balance in relation to the parens.


I think that I will need to write a real tokenizer and parser to get my
job done properly. I haven't done that before and it is something I
have always wanted to do but it seems like a *big* task.


Thanks again,
Peter

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