Stucki,
Your explanation makes perfect sense. Thanks for the correction and for
taking the time to explain this.
--Larry
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chr. von Stuckrad
> Sent: Friday, October 10, 2003 5:31 PM
> To: 'Spamassassin-Talk (E-mail)'
> Subject: Re: [SAtalk] Popcorn, Backhair, and Weeds
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 04:56:56PM -0400, Larry Gilson wrote:
> > As an > example, an exact count would be matched if I omit
> > the comma. /\w{5}/ will match exactly five word characters.
> Definitely yes.
>
> > Now if I modify that as /\w{5}?/, I believe that means zero or
> > one occurance of five word characters just as /\w{5}+/ should
> > mean one or more five word characters. I don't really know if
> > this works or not but I believe this is correct.
> Sorry, not in my 'man perlre'.
>
> The difference between a pattern
> (something){quantified}
> and with '?' as
> (something){quantified}?
> is that the '?' says
> 'make it the shortest match' ('nongreedy')!
> while without it the normal way is the longest match.
>
> There are two 'degenerate' cases:
>
> One is the above 'exact N characters' where the '?' seems to
> be useless (the longest or shortest exact N characters :-),
> and the other ist the well known '(something)?' which would
> be completely useless if not made greedy :-)
>
> But '(something){quantification}?' may have been created
> by combining strings and so the '?' is allowed on 'exact'
> counts I assume.
>
> Well, this all was in my 'man perlre' and hopefully did
> NOT change with the last upgrade from perl5.6 to 5.8?
>
> If it changed please somebody warn me ASAP :-)
>
> Stucki (postmaster at math.fu-berlin.de)
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