Re: Extended Regular Expressions

[azatoth]

Read up on Character Classes & Negated Character Classes, or speak to japhy about them if he's around.

Also, take a look at Death to Dot Star!.

Feel free to ask in the ChatterBox if you are still having problems after you've done the required reading.

Azatoth a.k.a Captain Whiplash

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[jroberts]

Thanks, i got this to work as expected using "negated" character classes. My original question still remains as a puzzle. why aren't the results (aka. the values of $&) of the two pattern matches different by the single character 'j' (taken from "joe")? it seems they should be. the zero-width lookahead doesn't seem to be "zero-width" at all. Regards, jroberts

[Hofmator]

Ok, the problem with [^\z] can be easily seen when you use warnings - which is a good idea in general. Perl complains then about an unidentified escape sequence in the character class. This means that \z is not the end of the string in a character class!! All metacharacters loose their special meaning in a character class.

So [^\z] is equivalent to [^z] which is a single character that is not a 'z'. Looking at your original regex print $& if /^<a href.*>(?=[^\z])/x; Consequently the .* in your regex eats up everything till the last '>' and checks if the next character is not a z. Which is true, as it is a newline. Ergo, match found, mystery solved :)

-- Hofmator