From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2005-09-14T22:03:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Surprising Regexp Behavior

On Sep 14, 2005, at 6:26 AM, Robert Klemme wrote:

> James Edward Gray II wrote:
>
>> I keep running into some surprising points with Ruby's Regexp engine
>> today and this first one just looks plain wrong to me:
>>
>> irb(main):001:0> html = "<p>one</p>\n\n<p>two</p>"
>> => "<p>one</p>\n\n<p>two</p>"
>> irb(main):002:0> html.sub!(/<p>(.*?)<\/p>(.*)/) { $1.strip }
>> => "one\n\n<p>two</p>"
>> irb(main):003:0> $2
>> => ""
>>
>
> Maybe I overlooked something but I didn't see anybody mention it: the
> trailing (.*) seems quite superfluous to me.  Why did you put it  
> there?

So I could check to see if there was more content after the first  
paragraph that I trimmed.  The code goes on to replace it with an  
ellipses if there was.

James Edward Gray II