From: Jason Sweat Date: 2004-11-18T23:13:26+09:00 Subject: Re: About Regular Expressions On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 22:04:43 +0900, trans. (T. Onoma) wrote: > On Thursday 18 November 2004 05:34 am, Nikolai Weibull wrote: > | Lately there have been a bunch of posts on this list about regular > | expressions in Ruby and people seem to cry wolf whenever they don't get > | them quite right. By crying wolf here I mean that they suspect a bug. > | That's most often the same as blaming core-dumps on the operating > | system. It's time that people try to reason about what they've actually > | written and look at the documentation (which may be too limited?) before > | complaining here. > > This is terrible. Not only is it unfair to disenfranchise newbies who, for > obvious reasons, would struggle with regular expressions, but the whole > premise if false. (ASFICT) I am responsible for most if not all the latest > R.E. posts. And I do not recall once suspecting a bug. I have asked about > extending features (such as Regexp.arity) and whether certain existing > features might not be more useful if they worked differently (like #scan). > Never did I cry wolf. (For a taste of your own medicine) Perhaps it's time > for you to try to read more carefully. I too brought up a regex question recently. My issue was that I understood how a particular regex worked in other languages (Perl, PHP), but was unable to implement in Ruby. I was specifically seeking advice on how to do it "the Ruby way". If this is not the appropriate forum for that, where else would be? In most cases like this, it seems to me if you feel the question is too naive, you are free to ignore the thread, and someone who has more pity or patience can help the individual who posted. Trying to throw up barriers to posting questions seems like isolationism that is not very characteristic of this list (at least from the brief time I have been lurking here). YMMV Regards, Jason -- http://blog.casey-sweat.us/