Re: [perl #33908] $ behaves inconsistent with \G

On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 04:22:43PM -0000, Ronald J Kimball via RT <perlbug-followup@perl.org> wrote:
> > "$" is being treated both as end-of-command and end-of-input, at different
> > places in my recursive descent parser.  As /\G$/ doesn't match the second
> > time, the parser assumes a parse error because something is following).
> 
> I believe this behavior is falls under the section "Repeated patterns
> matching zero-length substring" in perlre.

Thanks a lot, this seems to be the case indeed, and would therefore be a
feature, not a bug, as it is documented.

I do think it's suboptimal behaviour, though, as matching /\G$/ serves
no other purpose than matching an empty string, so the reason for this
behaviour does not apply (the only purpose of such a match would be an
empty match).

> I don't actually know whether it's supposed to behave that way in this
> specific case though.

According to the documentation you pointed out, it seems to behave
accorfding to the specs. I don't think it makes much sense here, but
finding and documenting a class of exceptions to this rule is probably not
profitable (and it can be worked around with pos, as the cases where this
comes up are known at development-time).

> Anyway, you may be able to work around this problem by setting pos after
> the first match, to clear the 'matched a zero-length substring' flag:

Thanks for the hint, I'll do that.

In the meantime, I think this bug report should be closed.

-- 
                The choice of a
      -----==-     _GNU_
      ----==-- _       generation     Marc Lehmann
      ---==---(_)__  __ ____  __      pcg@goof.com
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      -=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\      XX11-RIPE

• Re: [perl #33908] $ behaves inconsistent with \G by pcg
• [perl #33908] $ behaves inconsistent with \G by Marc Lehmann
• Re: [perl #33908] $ behaves inconsistent with \G by Ronald J Kimball