From: "Benjamin J. Tilly" <ben_tilly@...>
Date: 2001-03-20T22:34:01+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:12938] Re: email address regexp

>===== Original Message From merlyn@stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz) =====
>>>>> "Mathieu" == Mathieu Bouchard <matju@sympatico.ca> writes:
>
[...]
>Mathieu> A big improvement to the regexp (the email part or the whole)
>Mathieu> would be to rewrite it as a bunch of functions that each
>Mathieu> generate parts of the regexp.  Each part would be given a
>Mathieu> name and redundancy would be eliminated. If properly done it
>Mathieu> could even look like a grammar description.
>
>Yes, that's how this regex was generated!  The text is detailed
>in Jeffrey's book.
>
>Even with this regexp, only one level of comments is parsed.  Nested
>comments would not be matched, and regexp can't match arbitrarily
>nested things anyway, so it wouldn't matter.

I forget the trick that does it, but in Perl 5.6 Ilya finally
put enough RE extensions into the engine that a Perl RE actually
can handle arbitrarily nested things.

This can't, of course, be made to work in any other language
that offers REs.  But give it time...

Cheers,
Ben