On 21 Mar 2000, at 20:23, Philip Hazel wrote:
> 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".
$ perl -e '$x = "A terrible catastrophe\!"; $x =~ /cat|catastrophe/;
print "matched <$&>\n";'
matched <cat>
$
Same as Perl, so nothing wrong as far as I can see.
[;-)]
Regards - Kai Henningsen
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