From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2004-06-30T02:27:54+09:00
Subject: Re: another strange regexp case

Kristof Bastiaensen wrote:
> Hi,

Moin!

> here is another regexp behaviour which surprises me.
> There may be some logic behind it, but I fail to see it...
> irb(main):004:0> /(theone)?/.match(" theone").to_a
> => ["", nil]

I think that this is about how greediness in Regexps works:

A Regexp will try to match as much as possible starting at the current 
position, but even a "bad" match at the current position will be better 
than a "good" match at a later position in the String.

Maybe it would be possible to do a version of .match that finds the 
"best" (== longest, if greedy) match in the whole string. I assume that 
it would be based on .scan in some kind of way.

Regards,
Florian Gross