Can regular expressions be used to match nested patterns?

Posted by Richard Dorman on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Richard Dorman
Published on 2008-09-25T14:17:40Z Indexed on 2010/04/01 20:43 UTC
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Filed under:

regex

|

nested

|

finite-automata

Is it possible to write a regular expression that matches a nested pattern that occurs an unknown number of times. For example, can a regular expression match an opening and closing brace when there are an unknown number of open closing braces nested within the outer braces.

For example:

public MyMethod()
{
  if (test)
  {
    // More { }
  }

  // More { }
} // End

Should match:

{
  if (test)
  {
    // More { }
  }

  // More { }
}

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