Perl Weekly Challenge 390: Decoding Strings and Ordering Characters Solved

Episode 390 of The Weekly Challenge presented two programming tasks solvable with surprisingly compact Perl code. The first task required decoding a string encoded in the format K[encoded_string], where the inner string is repeated K times, including nested cases. The author solved it using a regex substitution with the /e flag to repeatedly evaluate Perl's repetition operator until all brackets were eliminated. The second task involved repeatedly moving one of the first K characters to the end of a string until the lexicographically smallest arrangement is reached. Both solutions turned out shorter than initially anticipated, with the decode task reduced to a single while-loop one-liner.