Re: Using Look-ahead and Look-behind

[jds17]

Thank you for your very nice article, I certainly learned some new tricks!

Just one little comment: The code in the last paragraph did not work because by default regular expressions are greedy. (Did this change with the Perl versions in between?) The only right-substring that comes out is the full string:

$_ = "Hello";
print "$1\n" while /(?=(.*))/g;

Output:

Hello

Making the "(.*)" part non-greedy fixes it (in Perl 5.10):

$_ = "Hello";
print "$1\n" while /(?=(.*)?)/g;

Output:

Hello
ello
llo
lo
o

[Roy Johnson]

I think you have found a bug in 5.10's regex handling. The lookahead's greediness or non-greediness should not matter, because it does not consume any characters. When used in a global match, patterns that do not consume characters should advance one character on each match. At least that's how I read the documentation.

The really interesting thing about your version is that you didn't make the capture non-greedy, you made it optional. You probably meant (.*?), which (in pre-5.10) will output empty strings every time. I haven't installed 5.10 myself, so I can't play with it right now.

[almut]

...which (in pre-5.10) will output empty strings every time.

With 5.10.0, /(?=(.*?))/g; outputs one empty string.  And I can confirm the behavior reported by jds17 with /(?=(.*))/g.

[jds17]

You are right, my change did not affect greediness. The bad thing is: now I don't understand why my proposed solution worked at all. Maybe someone can explain? I don't think the question is too important, but I like to use regular expressions and it bugs me a little if I cannot understand one (especially such a tiny one).

I have read the documentation you have cited and it helped, so I played around some more and tried out the following, which only exchanges "+" for "*" in your original expression, really works as one would think and therefore would be my preferred solution, at least for Perl 5.10:

$_ = "Hello";
print "$1\n" while /(?=(.+))/g;

Output:

Hello
ello
llo
lo
o