Patterns: balanced parentheses

[Benct Philip Jonsson]

Is there any way to match nested balanced parentheses or other delimiters in Vim patterns? I wish there were at least something like %b() in Lua patterns. (I see \%b is unused, so perhaps Vim can steal the Lua syntax! :-)

[rwmit...@gmail.com]

As far as I know '%' auto-jumps to matching parens/etc.

However, I am also using:

https://github.com/andymass/vim-matchup

[BPJ]

Den fre 14 okt. 2022 15:14rwmit...@gmail.com <rwmit...@gmail.com> skrev:

As far as I know '%' auto-jumps to matching parens/etc.

It does, but this is for inside a regex pattern, i.e. match balanced parens and any number of contained balanced parens, including recursively to any depth like "(...(...)...(...(...(...)...)...)...)". The rub is the recursive bit. Some regex engines, notably PCRE and Perl has pretty nifty support for recursive patterns[^1]. Lua patterns have something simpler, the construct `%b()` — where `(` and `)` may be any two chars/bytes but typically are one of the pairs () {} [] <> for obvious reasons. It matches properly balanced parentheses including recursively nested. The only limitation is that the matched text may not contain any unbalanced parens, so e.g. "( () (  ) " won't match. Unlike PCRE/Perl you can't specify what the outer parens shall contain; rather you just match a pair of balanced parentheses which may contain non-parentheses and/or nested balanced parentheses. It is still powerful enough in most cases, and I would hope that someone be willing to add such a construct to Vim regexes.

[^1]: https://metacpan.org/dist/perl/view/pod/perlre.pod#(?PARNO)-(?-PARNO)-(?+PARNO)-(?R)-(?0)

However, I am also using:

https://github.com/andymass/vim-matchup

On Friday, October 14, 2022 at 8:53:37 AM UTC-4 Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

Is there any way to match nested balanced parentheses or other delimiters in Vim patterns? I wish there were at least something like %b() in Lua patterns. (I see \%b is unused, so perhaps Vim can steal the Lua syntax! :-)

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