From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2004-09-19T08:51:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Method improvement request .--

On Sep 18, 2004, at 6:14 PM, Charles Hixson wrote:

> James Edward Gray II wrote:
>
>> On Sep 18, 2004, at 5:04 PM, James Edward Gray II wrote:
>>
>>> What about something like:
>>>
>>> def parse1(chunk)
>>>     if chunk =~ / ^([^-A-Za-z0-9]*) # pre-match
>>>                (.*) # middle
>>
>>
>> Sorry, that probably needs to be:
>>
>> (.*?)
>>
>> My bad.
>>
>> James Edward Gray II
>
> That would only work if the postmatch pattern were included in the 
> same pattern as the prematch, thus:
> if chunk =~ /^([^-A-Za-z0-9.]*)(.*?)[^-A-Za-z0-9.]*)$/

I did include all three in the same pattern, I just used the whitespace 
and comment modifier to pretty it up a bit.

/^([^-A-Za-z0-9.]*)(.*?)([^-A-Za-z0-9.]*)$/

Is the same as:

/
	^([^-A-Za-z0-9.]*)	# pre-match
	(.*?)				# middle
	([^-A-Za-z0-9.]*)$	# post-match
/x

Note the trailing /x.

James Edward Gray II