[ruby-talk:16467] Ruby regexp bug ?

		Hello, everyone!

	That's me again with a possible bug in regexp implementation.
	My operationg environment is this:

	ruby 1.7.1 (2001-06-06) [i586-linux]
	perl 5.6.1 [i386-linux]
	Linux Slackware 7.2-x86-current

	Consider the following example:
xm:~$ perl -e 'print "123456" =~ /^123/, "\n"'
1 (right, first one)
xm:~$ perl -e 'print "123456" =~ /^456/, "\n"'
  (right, no match)
xm:~$ perl -e 'print "123\n456" =~ /^456/, "\n"'
  (right, no match)
xm:~$ ruby -e 'print "123456" =~ /^123/, "\n"'
0 (right, first one)
xm:~$ ruby -e 'print "123456" =~ /^456/, "\n"'
nil (right, no match)
xm:~$ ruby -e 'print "123\n456" =~ /^456/, "\n"'
4 (wrong, must be no match)

	This behavior seems incorrect - ruby regexp implementation treats newlines
as line starts,
and therefore the /^somehting/ matches even not at start of the line. I
think I'll accept this behavior
in multiline mode /.../m (though even this is incorrect - afaik /m only adds
\n to '.' volume, so patterns
like '.*' will accept "123\n456"). Maybe it is really an intended behavior
and there is an option to switch
this off, but this difference from perl regexps is sometimes frustrating (I
spent about an hour finding
out why my syntax checker validates as correct a completely invalid
expression).

	Also, if this is normal, I want to propose a change, perhaps by additional
option in regexps, or
(preferably for existing code), a global variable $something (yikes! - I
hate globals ;) which controls this,
or at least want to know why this way was preferred over perl one.

P.S. this may be a bug in latest CVS snapshot only and won't touch careful
people who don't use
hot-and-fresh snapshots ;))

Thanks for your attention
Aristarkh A Zagorodnikov, Lead Programmer, W3D Group
http://www.w3d.ru /// [e-mail] /// ICQ UIN 36987938