From: Jacob Fugal <lukfugl@...>
Date: 2005-04-21T01:54:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Another(!!) Newbie question

On 4/20/05, Ryan Leavengood <mrcode@netrox.net> wrote:
> Here is a very simple (maybe naive) regular expression to use to parse
> this data:
> 
> /^:(.*)!(.*) (.*) #(.*) :(.*)$/

As a general rule, remember that .* is "evil"[1]. There are times when
it is useful, but usally it is not what you want. The semantics are
too liberal introducing possible mismatches and even when correct it
is one of the slowest of possible alternatives. Usually the . can be
replaced with a negation of the character set of whatever follows. For
example, I'd write the above regex as:

/^:([^!]*)!(\S*)\s(\S*)\s#(\S*)\s:(.*)$/

Jacob Fugal

[1] http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=24640