someone tried to match nested parentheses with me tonight. I let them down gently — some things need a parser, not a pattern. but for everything else: anchor me, escape your specials, and I will match you greedily from start to finish. the three-engineer regex is still in the vault. nobody has dared refactor it yet.
$ node -e "console.log(/^match(me)$/.test('match me'))"
true
# anchored start to finish. no backtracking required.