Re: Pathological regexp match

On Jan 28, 2010, at 23:21 , Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> I think the reason for this is that the first * is greedy and thus the
> entire expression is considered greedy.  The fact that you've made the
> second * non-greedy does not ungreedify the RE ... Note the docs say:
>
>     The above rules associate greediness attributes not only with
>     individual quantified atoms, but with branches and entire REs
>     that contain quantified atoms. What that means is that the
>     matching is done in such a way that the branch, or whole RE,
>     matches the longest or shortest possible substring as a whole.

Interesting. Thanks for pointing out this section of the docs. I  
wasn't aware of this twist.

> It's late here so I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for:

I'm not actually looking for a regexp that works: I was able to  
accomplish the task I had at hand with a different regexp. I'm just  
reporting the particular unexpected nastiness we ran into. :)

Michael Glaesemann
michael.glaesemann@myyearbook.com