Re: Perl 5's "non-greedy" matching can be TOO greedy!

On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Deven T. Corzine wrote:

> On 15 Dec 2000, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
> 
> > >>>>> "Deven" == Deven T Corzine <[email protected]> writes:
> > 
> > Deven> As for special-case rules, I believe that my proposed modification would
> > Deven> REMOVE a special-case semantic rule, at the cost of added complexity at the
> > Deven> implementation level.  (The cost decision of whether that added complexity
> > Deven> is worthwhile is a separate consideration.)

> > No, it would break a much higher overriding rule of "left most match
> > wins". 
> 
> Can you give a concrete, real-life example of code that my proposed change
> would actually break, not a contrived hypothetical case design to break?

well, there is the trivial case that it breaks

	m/b.*d/;

if i wrote that, i expect, since it is documented this way, to find the
first b and everything up to and including the first d after that.


but here's one from some code i wrote last week.  i want to find all the
groups of things like "212-555-1212".  this particular regex adequately
describes the un-normalized data that i had to munge. 

	@matches = m/(\d.*?)\s+/g;

the right way (the documented way), gives me the entire phone number.
yours give me "2".

you should be quiet now, or write your own language.


--
brian d foy                              <[email protected]>
Director of Technology, Smith Renaud, Inc.
875 Avenue of the Americas, 2510, New York, NY  10001
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