Operation ${operationNumber} has an unmatched closing select

Error message

Operation ${operationNumber} has an unmatched closing selection marker ⟫; add opening ⟪.

What it means

While expanding selections, the scanner walks the pattern character by character; if it encounters a closing ⟫ before any opening ⟪, the closing marker has no counterpart. This is the character-level equivalent of the count-based check and catches closings that appear before their opener in stream order.

Source

Thrown at packages/coding-agent/src/edit/sloppy.ts:648

}

function parseInlinePattern(
	pattern: string,
	operationNumber: number,
): { patternText: string; replacements: string[]; notes: string[] } {
	validateSelectionMarkers(pattern, operationNumber);
	let patternText = "";
	const replacements: string[] = [];
	const notes: string[] = [];
	let sawBare = false;
	let sawInline = false;

	for (let index = 0; index < pattern.length; ) {
		const codePoint = pattern.codePointAt(index);
		if (codePoint === undefined) break;
		const character = String.fromCodePoint(codePoint);
		if (character === SELECT_CLOSE) {
			throw new Error(`Operation ${operationNumber} has an unmatched closing selection marker ⟫; add opening ⟪.`);
		}
		if (character !== SELECT_OPEN) {
			patternText += character;
			index += character.length;
			continue;
		}

		const close = pattern.indexOf(SELECT_CLOSE, index + character.length);
		const selected = pattern.slice(index + character.length, close);
		if (selected.includes(SELECT_OPEN)) {
			throw new Error(
				`Operation ${operationNumber} has nested selection markers; use one selection per replacement.`,
			);
		}
		const divider = selected.indexOf(SELECT_DIVIDER);
		if (divider === -1) {
			sawBare = true;
			patternText += pattern.slice(index, close + SELECT_CLOSE.length);

View on GitHub (pinned to 9690622007)

Solutions

Move the ⟫ to after the text it should close (after the matching ⟪… span)
Add the missing ⟪ before the text you intend to select
Remove the stray ⟫ if no selection was intended

Example fix

// before
«old ⟫text⟪»new
// after
«old ⟪text⟫»new

Defensive patterns

Strategy: validation

Validate before calling

let depth = 0;
for (const ch of pattern) {
  if (ch === '⟪') depth++;
  if (ch === '⟫') { if (depth === 0) throw new Error('⟫ before ⟪'); depth--; }
}
if (depth !== 0) throw new Error('unclosed ⟪');

Try / catch

try {
  applySloppy(content, input, ctx);
} catch (err) {
  if (err instanceof Error && err.message.includes('unmatched closing selection marker')) {
    // reorder/remove the stray ⟫ and re-send
  } else throw err;
}

Prevention

Ensure each ⟫ appears strictly after its ⟪ in stream order
Escape or avoid quoting code that contains ⟫ literally inside selections
Validate marker ordering with a depth counter before submitting

When it happens

Trigger: applySloppy operation pattern where an ⟫ occurs at a position with no preceding active ⟪ (e.g. pattern starts with ⟫, or a previous selection already consumed its opener).

Common situations: Reordered or duplicated marker characters when an LLM edits a payload; quoting code that itself contains ⟫; manual payload hand-editing that moved the close before the open.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of can1357/oh-my-pi@9690622007 (2026-08-31). Data as JSON: /api/errors/44bd672d75622e52. Report an issue: GitHub.