Haha yeah... I tried to tweak the regex to get it working right, but bit burned out on coding from work to finish. I typically use a site like www.regex101.com so I can visually see how it's matching to a set of text. Can then stick in a variety of test cases and see how it responds. I was able to tweak it to accept:
var blah = {
<tab indented text>
}
But the solution wouldn't have worked for single lines. Likely could have made it work with some more groupings and or operators. I used that site earlier to figure out why some of my code wasn't working, as in my own mod,it also fails on:
var randomportraits = load(globals.modfolder + "/randomportraits/randomportraits.gd").new()
Because it only matches on
var randomportraits = load(globals.modfolder
and inserts that into the file, breaking the game. Thus, i did var blah = null, and then conditionally load it first time i need it.