Here's a neat little trick I came up with for removing nested patterns from a string. var str = "abc<1<2<>3>4>def"; while (str != (str = str.replace(/<[^<>]*>/g, ""))); // str -> "abcdef" Notice that the regex in this one-liner doesn't try to deal with nested patterns at all. The while loop's condition replaces instances of <…> [...]

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Update: This version of XRegExp is outdated. See XRegExp.com for the latest, greatest version. If you haven't seen the prior versions, XRegExp is an MIT-licensed JavaScript library that provides an augmented, cross-browser implementation of regular expressions, including support for additional modifiers and syntax. Several convenience methods and a new, powerful recursive-construct parser that uses regex [...]

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The .NET Framework's regular expression package includes a unique feature called balancing groups, which is a misnomer since although they can indeed be used to match balanced constructs, that's not all they're good for and really has nothing to do with how they work. Unfortunately, balancing groups are quite poorly documented. Following is a brief [...]

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When I posted my matchRecursive function the other day (which allows easily matching nested constructs), I noted that it could easily be modified to work with a regex pattern rather than a string as the format argument. After looking at it again, I realized the conversion wouldn't be entirely straightforward, so I've gone ahead and [...]

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In the past, I've touched on using regexes to match nested constructs up to a predetermined depth, which is the best you can do unless you're using one of the three regex engines (Perl, PCRE, and .NET) which are currently able to handle true recursion. Well, recently I wanted to be able to support unlimited [...]

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