.NET Regex balancing groups expression - matching when not balanced

Question

.NET balanced group regexes make my head explode. I\'ve got this string i\'m trying to match:

other stuff blah blah....
                    {
                           


        

Answer 1

Have you checked what it is matching in the second case? Since you don't have any anchors, I think the engine starts the match just after the first '{'. From there, until the end, the string matches.

Try surrounding the pattern with \A and \z.