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Postings from August 2010
demerphq wrote:
> On 10 August 2010 23:32, karl williamson <public@khwilliamson.com> wrote:
>> If we're going to do this, I'd like to do it now before the new regex
>> modifiers go in.
>>
>> Aristotle withdrew his opposition and became a supporter after he understood
>> what the proposal really was. Sorry for being unclear.
>>
>> If there's no opposition, we need to settle on what is the syntax is. Ben
>> originally proposed (?~ I thought (?. was better because the tilde can be
>> too easily confused with a hyphen, (?- which is also legal right after the
>> question mark.
>>
>> Another option is to make it a two character sequence, the first one is a
>> tilde, say, and I'm not sure what the second one should be. This would
>> allow future expansion so that some other 2nd char could mean something
>> else. Mostly people wouldn't type this, it would be inserted by the regex
>> compiler.
>
> Karl can you present this to us as it might be documented in perlre?
>
> Im still having a hard time grokking this one....
>
> Yves
>
>
>
>
Here is an initial stab at it, using a period for the character:
diff --git a/pod/perlre.pod b/pod/perlre.pod
index 98aafdd..40bae6c 100644
--- a/pod/perlre.pod
+++ b/pod/perlre.pod
@@ -636,6 +636,8 @@ X<(?:)>
=item C<(?imsx-imsx:pattern)>
+=item C<(?.imsx-imsx:pattern)>
+
This is for clustering, not capturing; it groups subexpressions like
"()", but doesn't make backreferences as "()" does. So
@@ -657,6 +659,33 @@ is equivalent to the more verbose
/(?:(?s-i)more.*than).*million/i
+Starting in Perl 5.14, a C<.> (dot) immediately after the C<?> is a
+shorthand equivalent to C<-imsx>. Any positive or negative flags may
+follow the dot, so
+
+ (?.x-i:foo)
+
+is equivalent to
+
+ (?x-ims:foo)
+
+(The C<-i> wasn't necessary, but did no harm.)
+
+The dot tells Perl that this cluster doesn't inherit the flags of any
+surrounding pattern, but to go back to the system defaults (C<-imsx>),
+modified by any flags specified.
+
+The dot allows for simpler stringification of compiled regular
+expressions. These look like
+
+ (?.:pattern)
+
+with any non-default flags appearing between the dot and the colon.
+A test that looks at such stringification thus doesn't need to have the
+system default flags hard-coded in it, just the dot. If new flags are
+added to Perl, the meaning of the dot's expansion will change to include
+the default for those flags, so the test will still work, unchanged.
+
=item C<(?|pattern)>
X<(?|)> X<Branch reset>
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