Tollef Fog Heen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >* (Colin Watson) >| Contrary to the subconscious assumption many people make, the first >| priority for a regex is to match earliest, not to match longest. >| regex(7) specifically mentions this: > >For a non-POSIX regex, that is.
Could you point me to some documentation about this? regex(7) claims to describe POSIX 1003.2 regular expressions, and describes leftmost-first behaviour. regcomp(3) claims to describe POSIX regex compilation and execution, and refers to regex(7) and the GNU regex manual for further documentation. The GNU regex manual (assuming this means the documentation in librx1g-dev) is ambiguous: it says "In every case like this, the longer match is preferred", but the example it gives is one of alternative subexpressions rather than an earliest vs. longest issue. Furthermore, a brief test program produces output consistent with earliest matches against both libc6 and librx1g, both of which claim to provide POSIX regex engines. So is there no correct POSIX regex library in Debian? Thanks, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
