regex-cannot-handle-recursive-nesting

IN premiseentries/2026/06/21/wiki-Tokenization_lexical_analysis.md

Created 2026-06-21T09:50:11+00:00

Regular expressions cannot handle recursive or nested patterns (e.g., matching nested parentheses); that requires a parser with a stack.

Summary

Regular expressions hit a hard wall when patterns nest inside themselves, like balanced parentheses or nested tags; they simply cannot track open and close markers at arbitrary depth. Any system that needs to parse such structures must use a stack-based parser instead, because a regex will silently fail the moment nesting goes one level deeper than the pattern accounts for.