Unfortunately, you've hit an ugly problem for regex, Marty. Check out the section on "Difficulties and Impossibilities" from "Mastering Regular Expressions" at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex/chapter/ch04.html
"In fact, the problem is that you simply can't match arbitrarily nested constructs with regular expressions. It just can't be done. You can construct a regular expression that matches nested constructs up to a certain depth, but not to any arbitrary level of nesting. A regular expression to allow just one level of nesting is the monstrosity \([^()]*(\([^()]*\)[^()]*)*\)..., so the thought of having to worry about further levels of nesting is frightening. Sometimes, you just have to use other, non-regex methods." -- Maciek Sakrejda Truviso, Inc. http://www.truviso.com -----Original Message----- From: marty.pitt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Subject: [flexcoders] Help with RegEx Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:22:08 -0000 Hi Can someone please give me a hand on a RegEx? (I can't work these things out for the life of me). I'm basically trying to return nested groups inside delimeters. An example we're all famililar with is the simple package / class structure in Flex: package foo { class bar { function stuff { ... } } } Given the delimeters oof { and }, I want to be able to return: function stuff { ... } As well as class bar { function stuff { ... } } etc., up the chain. I currently have the following regex working: {\d*?\D*?} Which works fine without nesting. As soon as you introduce nested elements, it all gets a bit messy. any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers Marty
