From: Ryan Leavengood <mrcode@...>
Date: 2005-04-21T02:27:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Another(!!) Newbie question

Thanks for the information and link. I wrote the example for kyu like I
did to purposely keep it simple. But he should definitely use something
more like your regex in his final code. So kyu, if you are listening,
please do so :)

Also that link is a good read for anyone who likes to use regular
expressions (which is probably every Ruby programmer.) I have a copy of
"Mastering Regular Expressions" (mentioned in the link) on a CD
somewhere...I need to find it and do some review.

Ryan

Jacob Fugal wrote:
>
> 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