Jeff and .NET

Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do. Regular expressions are not able to match balanced expressions (e.g. things like matching braces, or matching HTML tags). You can do what you've got there, which is make it so that it supports only one set of nested elements, or multiple sets of non-nested elements (by using (.*?) as your "meat" - i.e. a non-greedy search) but without some wacky extension to the regular expression grammer itself, you can't have the best of both worlds.

I think the best thing you can do is structure your forums so that you can simply replace all [quote] text with a single construct, and all [/quote] with a single construct - i.e. don't rely on them being matched together. Then you can perhaps put some custom logic in to make sure there's an equal number of [quote] and [/quote] tags.

For example, if you simply replace all instances of [quote] with <blockquote> and all instances of [/quote] with </blockquote>, then (apart from validating the input) you don't really need to know that it's all matched properly.

Try:
(\[quote\])(.*?)(\[/quote\])

From msdn:
*? - Specifies the first match that consumes as few repeats as possible (equivalent to lazy *).

I do that for all of the non-block elements, but it's a lot harder to do it with block elements like this one, and p tags (which come from line breaks).

Wes: That breaks the nesting. It grabs the inner-most [/quote] instead of the outside one.

Holy crap!

I did a bit more research, and it seems Microsoft did add methods for matching nested constructs! Go Microsoft!!

There's a chapter in "Mastering Regular Expressions" (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596002890/026-9448710-1434859) on how to do it. Luckily, O'Reily have made the chapter in question available for download from: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex2/chapter/ch09.pdf - see the "Matching Nested Constructs" section.

There are some proposed extensions to Perl to allow for similar constructors (see, for example: http://www.puffinry.freeserve.co.uk/regex-extension.html) but they're not in perl per-se yet.

I have been looking at this expression from Ch9 of the book Dean mentioned above. With this expression syntax you can match nested items but I think it is still greedy. I'm not sure we can do what you want with .Net regular expressions.

It should work because it only matches *balanced* expressions. So for example, if you have (assuming we're matching parenthases here):

(The (quick) brown fox) jumped (over the (lazy dog))

You'll get two matches:

(The (quick) brown fox)
and
(over the (lazy dog))

Which is what Jeff wants...

Dean you are correct. Matching ()'s is a little different then matching [quote][/quote] but not much harder, just takes a little different angle. After examining more closely I was able to figure out how to do what Jeff wants.

Jeff if you are still interested try:
(?:\[quote\])(?<quote>(?>(?:\[quote\])(?<DEPTH>)|(?:\[/quote\])(?<-DEPTH>)|.)+)(?(DEPTH)(?!))(?:\[/quote\])

Test string:
[quote]quote 1 [quote]quote 2[/quote] after quote 2[/quote][quote]quote 2[/quote]

Matches
1) [quote]quote 1 [quote]quote 2[/quote] after quote 2[/quote]
"quote" 1) quote 1 [quote]quote 2[/quote] after quote 2

2)[quote]quote 2[/quote]
"quote" 2) quote 2

I believe that is what you were after Jeff.