Removing nested [quote] tags in ruby

Question

I'm writing a forum application in Rails and I'm stuck on limiting nested quotes.

I'm try to use regex and recursion, going down to each matching tag, counting the levels and if the current level is > max, deleting everything inside of it. Problem is that my regex is only matching the first [ quote ] with the first seen [ /quote ], and not the last as intended.

The regex is just a slight tweak of what was given in the docs of the custom bbcode library I'm using (I know very little about regex, I've tried to learn as much as I can in the past couple days but I'm still stuck). I changed it so it'd include [quote], [quote=name] and [quote=name;222] . Could someone examine my code and let me know what the problem could be? I'd appreciate it lots.

def remove_nested_quotes(post_string, max_quotes, count)
    result = post_string.match(/\[quote(:.*)?(?:)?(.*?)(?:)?\](.*?)\[\/quote\1?\]/mi)

    if result.nil?
      return false
    elsif  (count = count+1) > max_quotes
      full_str = result[0]
      offset_beg = result.begin(3)
      offset_end = result.end(3)
      excess_quotes = full_str[offset_beg ..offset_end ]
      new_string = full_str.slice(excess_quotes )
      return new_string
    else
      offset_beg = result.begin(3)
      offset_end = result.end(3)
      full_str = result[0]
      inner_string = full_str[offset_beg..offset_end]
      return remove_nested_quotes(inner_string , max, count)
   end
end

Answer 1

I mean something like

counter = 0
max = 5

loop do
    matched = false
    string.match /endquote|quote/ do |match|
       matched = true
       if endquote matched
         counter -= 1     
       else # quote matched
         counter += 1
       end
       if counter > max
         # Do something, break or return             
       else
         string = match.post_match
       end
    end
    break unless matched
end