Re: Re: Regex woes...

[adamsj]

And that raises an interesting point, which probably has a trivial answer which I don't know. Why doesn't a construct like \d{1-3} make -w scream?

Even more oddly, if it's reversed to say \d{3-1}, it neither makes -w scream nor does it DWIM and match, say, -12.3, like it would if it were \d{2}.

adamsj

They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it. --Gracie Allen

[wog]

-Mre=debug reveals the answer:

...
Compiling REx `\d{3-1}'
...
   1: DIGIT(2)
   2: EXACT <{3-1}>(5)
   5: END(0)
...

Apparently this means the regex got compiled to match a digit, and then the literal text {3-1}. It would be nice if perl recognized that there might have been confusion with the {M,N} syntax, and thus would throw a warning, though issues of backwards compatiblity would need to be considered in doing this.

[japhy]

If you look at regcomp.c, you'll see that when the regx parser finds an open brace, it looks for digits, and optionally followed by a comma and another optional string of digits. Anything else falls through as plaintext. (See the S_regpiece() function.)

japhy -- Perl and Regex Hacker