From: "trans.  (T. Onoma)" <transami@...>
Date: 2004-09-23T05:15:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Regexp Arity

On Wednesday 22 September 2004 03:47 pm, David A. Black wrote:
> To back up slightly: I can't help wondering under what conditions you
> would need to know this.  Can you present the problem you were trying
> to solve?  Maybe there's a simpler way.

I'm pattern matching a document. When a match is found the match/submatches 
are passed to various procs. If the regexp has groupings I want to pass the 
group matches, if not just the whole match. I could just go by the matchdata 
length, but the regexp is stored in a dedicated "token" class and that class 
may need to be initialized differently based on that "arity".

But granted, I did just work out a different approach, so as of this moment I 
won't need it. Although I see no good reason that information shouldn't be 
available. As I think Simon pointed out with his engine, "it is in there".

Thanks,
T.