Makeshifts last the longest.

Good point. My original example code didn't handle that case correctly in part because it started out as an example of using a regular expression to match record terminators and in part because I had not fully considered the effect of //z on greedy matches until I replied to theorbtwo's node.

We already have a separate "continue where it left off last time" feature for regular expressions: //g in a scalar context and pos(). So my example is easy to fix by dropping /z once I've found end-of-stream. I'll update it shortly to reflect this.

Note that my example fetches pos() in order to strip stuff from the front of the buffer, therefore each match is performed with pos()=0. If, for example, you were instead matching record terminators, then you would instead fetch pos() in order to restore it before the next match (since the sysread updates the contents of the buffer which also resets its pos).

Thanks,
                - tye

But how does the regex engine know that that search sans /z is supposed to be the finishing search of the previous series of /z searches, as opposed to an entirely new pattern to be applied? What I'm talking about is analogous to using /gc and then finally only /c to conclude the series of matches. If there was no /g, the (lack of) presence of /c alone would be ambiguous.

Makeshifts last the longest.