Regexes For Life

…have been troubling me for days now.

The Regex engine maintains a stack, so regular expressions in Perl can be constructed recursively. For instance,

$paren = qr/
      \(
        (
           [^()]+           # Not parens
         |
           (??{$paren})  # Another balanced group
        )*
      \)
    /x;

matches a string if parentheses in the string are paired correctly. (Taken from Regexp Power.)

That funny (??{}) (apparently) keeps qr/ / from interpolating the variable in the funny brackets when the expression is compiled- saving the interpolation for when the matching is carried out, which sends it recursing deeper.

So here’s the question:

A palindrome is a nested set of palindromes. That is, a [ palindrome - {first character, last character} ] is a palindrome again, and so forth until there is (i) nothing, or (ii) one character left. Cases (i) and (ii) are palindromes by definition. So how do you write a regex that matches any palindrome?

The best I could do was:

$palin = qr/
                 (.)?                     #Any character or no character, captured
                 (??{$palin})?            #A palindrome, not interpolated yet
                 \1                       #Character captured in line 1
            /x;

But this doesn’t work. Any ideas?