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Postings from June 2013
On Sat, 22 Jun 2013, demerphq wrote: > Sorry about the incredibly laggy reply. :-( Hi Yves, No problem; glad somebody has picked this up. For myself, I can no longer remember exactly what I was complaining about! > I think you are right that perl thinks differently to you. Probably > because of implementation details. Thanks for taking the time to give a long explanation of the way Perl works, which indeed is different to the way PCRE works - and of course it's far too late to change that now. In a recent release of PCRE we have formulated some reasonably consistent rules for way that backtracking verbs are handled, and documented them. In many cases the behaviour is the same as Perl's, but there are some differences. > Anyway, I can see how it would be reasonable to consider (?:foo) to be > an alternation with only one branch, but to Perl it isnt, and that is > how you should interpret the verb operators. PCRE does now get this (perhaps not 100%, but to some extent) "right" in its current treatment of (*THEN). The documentation even says this: "A subpattern that does not contain a | character is just a part of the enclosing alternative; it is not a nested alternation with only one alternative." Regards, Philip -- Philip HazelThread Previous | Thread Next