Re: Regex Critic?

[LanX]

Not that easy.

There are different categories of "bad practice" like unmaintainable code or dangerous code.

It's possible to built little regexes which run for years just b/c backtracking goes exponential in Perl but not in egrep.

So this depends on the engine used and involved optimization. (that much about "static analyzer for several languages")

At the same time the code you showed m/^.*blah.*$/ might be odd but not necessarily slower, cause AFAIK will Perl first try to find the string "blah" somewhere, before continuing.

And it's NOT IDENTICAL to m/blah/ cause multilines wouldn't match w/o /s modifier.

  DB<100> $str="\n blah \n"

 blah 

  DB<101> $str =~ /blah/
 => 1

  DB<102> $str =~ /^.*blah.*$/

  DB<103> $str =~ /^.*blah.*$/s
 => 1

So what's the recommended best practice here in your opinion?

Regarding analyzers, you might be interested in this recent discussion, which had pointers to different projects and older discussions:

Parsing and translating Perl Regexes

HTH! =)

[QM]

Thanks for the pointers. I've read somewhere else, for instance, a recommendation to always use /ms unless there's a good reason not to. Also educated_foo's suggestion below for /a and /aa.

Ultimately I'd like to collect a reasonable list for Perl REs, and where necessary, extend/amend that for non-Perl.