On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, Kai Henningsen wrote:
> > (I hope you aren't now also going to suggest a change to regular
> > expression matching in PCRE to go for the longest possible match... :-)
>
> PCRE mirrors Perl re behaviour, no? So it also has * vs. *?
> behaviour. And anyway, that doesn't seem to have any relevance
> whatsoever that I can detect.
I wasn't thinking of * and *?. Consider the regular expression
/cat|catastrophe/
matched against the line
A terrible catastrophe!
What does it match? Longest? I'm afraid not. It matches "cat".
[But I was joking when I made the original comment about regexes.]
I'll put this one on my list to think about. You are right in that it is
the case where more than one suffix matches that is interesting.
Philip
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
