This could be considered a documentation bug, so I'm not really sure it should be submitted here, but this page states that
In addition, the END subtag supports the attribute REGEXP, which if set to TRUE, tells the highlighter to interpret the END text as a regular expression as well.
This is absolutely false, as any simple test will demonstrate:
<SPAN_REGEXP HASH_CHAR="a"> <BEGIN>aaa</BEGIN> <END REGEXP="TRUE">[a]</END> </SPAN_REGEXP>
This span is only closed by the string "[a]", not the character "a"
The END REGEXP works as documented. It is used with great effect in several of the existing mode files.