How do I use regex to capture the nth pattern on each line?

Question

background:

For syntax highlighting in Sublime Text,
you can write a tmLanguage file with a corresponding tmTheme file.

The tmLanguage file contains regular expressions in which you give names to,
and then the tmTheme file uses those names to style what was captured.

I want to colorize the same pattern differently depending on how many duplicate patterns came before it. Or, to put it another way, I want to style the nth match of each pattern on each line differently.

the problem:

So for example,
How can I write 3 regular expressions to match the following bold groups?

< foo >< bar >< baz >
< foo >< bar >< baz >
< foo >< bar >< baz >

anything could be inside of < >.

expression 1 would capture the first instance of <*.?>
expression 2 would capture the second instance of <*.?>
expression 3 would capture the third instance of <*.?>

Assume the three examples above are actually the same line.
My goal is to get get each group a different color

<this would be red> <this would be orange> <this would be yellow> <etc..>

The regular expression language is Oniguruma.

---

My attempts so far:

I can capture the first group like this:

^<.*?>

I can't find out how to capture the second group only

^<.*?>{2}            captures nothing
<.*?>{2}             captures nothing
<.*?>{2,}            captures nothing
^(?:<.*?>)<.*?>      captures 1st and 2nd 
^(?!<.*?>)<.*?>      captures nothing
^(?=<.*?>)(<.*?>)    captures 1st
^(?=<.*?>)(<.*?>){1} captures 1st
^(?=<.*?>)(<.*?>){2} captures 1st and 2nd
(?=<.*?>)(<.*?>)     captures everything

Answer 1

You can use

(?m)^(?:<[^>]*>[[:blank:]]*){1}\K<[^>]*>

To match the second value. Then, just increment the 1 to get further values.

Here is a demo

The thrid value will be matched with (?m)^(?:<[^>]*>[[:blank:]]*){2}\K<[^>]*>, etc.