I agree that this is confusing, and I think many resources describing regex in unhelpful ways is partly to blame. descriptions like "pattern that matches against a string" and similar.
this implies that a regex has to match the string, but this is not the case. a regex does not have to match the string, instead the string has to satisfy the regex. "aaa" satisfies /a{,2}/ because it contains everything the regex requires. thinking of regex in this way has been a help to me atleast 😊 -L -------- Original Message -------- On 22. jan. 2024, 13:23, Jorge Almeida wrote: > Please help me to understand this: > $ perl -e 'exit(10) if "aaa"=~/a{,2}/;' > $ echo $? > $ 10 > > Thanks > > Jorge Almeida