Re: Self-recognizing programs and regular expressions

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 11:05:15PM +0000, Ton Hospel wrote:
> Ah, the idea seems salvagable, but less elegant:
> 
> this sequence is self matching:
> ^
> ^\^
> ^\^\\\^
> ^\^\\\^\\\\\\\^
> ....
> 
> so an infinite sequence of ^ with 2**n-1 \ after the n-th ^


This is also self matching:

  \A\\A\\\\A\\\\\\\\A....

with 2**(n-1) \s before the n-th A.



Years ago, while I was still writing JAPHs, I was looking for a regex
matching itself - and nothing but itself (regexes that match themselves,
and also other strings are easy and IMO, not interesting), but I never
found one. The search wasn't entirely fruitless, it did lead to:

       my $qr =  qr/^.+?(;).+?\1|;Just another Perl Hacker;|;.+$/;
          $qr =~  s/$qr//g;
    print $qr, "\n";


But that's a far cry from what I wanted to find.



Abigail

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