> In actual code, it is of course attached to some definition like `type: TOK_STRING`. Yes, naming helps. I was mostly sympathizing with the people whose brain

> In actual code, it is of course attached to some definition like `type: TOK_STRING`. Yes, naming helps. I was mostly sympathizing with the people whose brains explode at the sight of a regex. It’s surprising how much time it took me to be sure I understood your simple pattern. > Are you confusing this with that e.g. the language of validly parenthesized expressions is not regular? A single string with the option to escape any character including the escape character and terminator is regular. This is a good correction, thank you. I was thinking of cases where balanced pairs allow both escaped delimiters and nested pairs. > This feels like a big leap for something I didn't say was even involved in web development. I hope it’s clear I didn’t intend to make that leap, and was just generally reflecting on the ways simple patterns can go awry. That’s why I said “for example” and “would”. If someone were to take this pattern or any of the variants and use it in a context that writes innerHTML, it would be vulnerable to XSS by failing to account for multi-character tokens like " in its escaping. > The two languages I have most often used this in don't use slash delimiters, so I think this has only added ambiguity - now we are considering it embedded in some specific-but-unspecified language's regexp syntax where we might need to consider another level of escaping - compared to letting the regex stand "bare".) I understand that many languages don’t use slash delimiters. But it’s quite common to use them for regex where a language context isn’t assumed. My point wasn’t to impose slashes on your example but to make it explicitly knowable, in words, whether the quotes were intended as part of the pattern. Not knowing that was the primary reason I wasn’t sure I understood the pattern’s intent.