Hi,
are you sure that this will really solve your problem? What about curly braces in comments?
I don't think I'd reinvent the wheel this way. I'd rather try to get some already more sophisticated machine setup to fullfill my wishes. Maybe one could use the programming mode of his/her favorite editor, which probably already does some checking like this. I could also imagine that indent and gcc or some TAGs creating programms might be helpfull. Or in XEmacs you might want to call M-x occur RET [{}] (I had rather used a tt-font here, but I needed to use code-Tags to get the brackets) or maybe M-x count-matches RET { and then compare to the count of }.

I know that this doesn't quite answer your question, which has been adressed above. It just shall save you from further problems...

Regards...	Stefan
you begin bashing the string with a +42 regexp of confusion