Re: Wondering what I'm doing wrong?

On 11 Jun 2026, at 13:23, David McClain (as dbm at refined-audiometrics dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Yes… except that the language grammar rules for ESRAP are clearly spelled out, while those of CL-PPCRE are not. But with CL-PPCRE we do have its stated goal of acting like Perl, and replete Perl documentation - which applies only to the line noise forms.

The documentation for CREATE-SCANNER tells you how the sexp notation corresponds to the line noise one.  You are expected to know Perl's regexps, I agree.

>From an earlier message:

> The only irritating thing I have run into with the string regexps is that to enclose a group so that you can add a +,*,or ? afterward, also causes the group to be recorded in a “register” (to use the PPCRE terminology). This is not always desired, and I can see that by using the sexpr language they could be avoided.

This is "(?:<pattern>)" in Perl's syntax, and (:group ...) in the sexp syntax:

? (parse-string "(abc)+")
(:greedy-repetition 1 nil (:register "abc"))

? (parse-string "(?:abc)+")
(:greedy-repetition 1 nil (:group "abc"))

--tim


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