It was thus said that the Great albertmcchan once stated:
> looks like it is not easy to convert lua pattern "(.*)and(.*)" after all
>
> my last attempt, re.compile "{(!'and' .)*} 'and' {.*}" was close, but still wrong
>
> the re pattern correspond to lua pattern "(.-)and(.*)", not the greedy version.
You might want to read the thread starting here:
http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2017-10/msg00126.html
I think relevant to your problem is this post:
http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2017-10/msg00140.html
But the entire thread has a lot of information about LPeg and Lua patterns.
-spc