Thanks @aengelberg. I wonder if my <anything> was more complicated than that when I tried it. Hmm, there may be a useful project in "parsing" instaparse code into regex suitable for grabbing parsable chunks. I'm pretty sure instaparse is generating regex on the backend; but the capture-groups would need some editing.
that is not correct, instaparse parses context free langauges, which regexes cannot do
(regular languages are a subset of context free languages)
@hiredman I think I see what you mean. The problems I've been solving are probably simple enough that regex could define the same patterns. I suppose, getting into some real recursive stuff, it'd be less easy to go from instaparse-code to regex that says "grab a block of text that looks like this".