I'm confused. Please explain how your needed output differs from your original string; they appear the same to me. If you intend to capture everything, please explain what you're trying to not capture, or at least what you would like to fail to match.

Update:
Do you really want Text::Balanced's extract_bracketed() subroutine? It can be used to essentially capture the "balanced parens" portion of a string. Observe:

use strict;
use warnings;

use Text::Balanced qw( extract_bracketed );

my $text='(one dfd(two(three)four()(five)df())df)';

my $balanced = extract_bracketed( $text );

print "$balanced\n";
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Also note, if the return value of extract_bracketed() is undef (in scalar context), it means the parens weren't balanced.

hi Gopal, try this one

print $& if $text=~m#(\(.*\))#;

the problem of your solution is that it takes all the text (parenthesis included) between the first open parenthesis and the last closed parenthesis, even if they are not balanced! :-P

cheers

perl -Te 'print map { chr((ord)-((10,20,2,7)[$i++])) } split //,"turo"'

Hi gopalr, If I understood your question correctly then try this,

use Regexp::Common;

while (<DATA>) {        
(/$RE{balanced}{-begin => "("}{-end => ")"}/) ? (print "Line $. : Matc
+hed: $&\n") : (print "Line $. : Not Matched\n");                
}
    
__DATA__
This is my (one dfd(two(three)four()(five)df())df) text.
This is my (one text.
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Output is :

Line 1 : Matched: (one dfd(two(three)four()(five)df())df)
Line 2 : Not Matched
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#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $text='(one dfd(two(three)four()(five)df())df)';
print $& if $text=~m#(.*)#;
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This kind of match is notoriously hard to perform. Try some dedicated module like Text::Balanced. OTOH I'm sure I saw at least one very in-depth article explaining how to do it with regexen. I can't remember where to find it. I bet japhy knows, though...

This thread Recursive regular expression weirdness had some good recipes for pulling out balanced bracket pairs.

Cheers,

JohnGG

WHO HAS WAKED ME FROM MY SLUMBER?

Oh, it's blazar. Simply put, to do it with regexes, you'd do something like:

my $paren_rx;
$paren_rx = qr{
  \(
  (?:
    (??{ $paren_rx })         # either match another paren-set
    | (?s: [^\\()]+ | \\. )+  # or match non-parens (or escaped parens
+)
  )?
  \)
}x;

my ($chunk) = $string =~ /((??{$paren_rx}))/;
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It's not kid-tested, nor mother-approved, but it feels right, and that's where it counts. In the gut. Long live truthiness. Stephen Colbert++.

---

Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart

Yes, but I seem to remember an article, perhaps downloadable in .pdf form that explained "this kinda things" in detail and from step to step. The OP could be interested in it...

use strict;
my $text='(one dfd(two(three)four()(five)df())df)';

print $text if (my @x = $text =~ m/\(/g) == (my @y = $text =~ m/\)/g);
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