Re: Re: Common Regex Gotchas

Sorry - re-reading it, I realized that I accidently inserted html tags that are not showing up.

I found the Greedy section to be quite confusing. First of all, I think you probably have a couple slash-s'es in your html that is causing it to not print and makes the last couple paragraphs very difficult to understand and read.

Also, I'm still confused about why there is a match at all in the first example. Why doesn't the engine continue backwards past the whitespace and look for a <\/tag> string?

Finally, why does the last example (still in the Greedy section) work? If, when creating the example string, I carraige return after the <\/tag>, there shouldn't be a whitespace to match on, right?

Finally, finally, thanks for putting this together... it's really speeding my ramp along...

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Re: Re: Re: Common Regex Gotchas
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Nov 27, 2001 at 04:47 UTC

Why doesn't the engine continue backwards past the whitespace and look for a <\/tag> string?

Because the engine prefers the longest match that starts at the leftmost possible position. When it hits .*, it jumps all the way to the end of the string and then backtracks, trying to match the next necessary character. Because it's backtracking, it matches </tag> at the end of the string. That fits the pattern, so it doesn't continue backtracking to find a shorter match.

If, when creating the example string, I carraige return after the <\/tag>, there shouldn't be a whitespace to match on, right?

The /s flag allows the '.' token to match newlines. Adding the minimal token '?' avoids the jump-to-end-then-backtrack behavior. It works like you'd expect, trying to match as few characters as possible.

Does that clear it up? I've also touched up the formatting somewhat.

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