From: Hugh Sasse <hgs@...>
Date: 2005-11-22T02:08:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Regular Expressions and Ruby

On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, George Lunsford wrote:

        [...]
> little program to test if a word was made up of symbols from the periodic
> table. [...]
> properly as a (nonsense) word like "presenti" should be periodic according
> to my list of elements, [p][re][se][n][ti]. Now, I can duplicate this
> behavior with the regex coach oddly enough. The problem seems to be that it
> parses [p][re][s] instead of [se]. I'm wondering if anyone can explain this

Try putting a $ on the end.  The regexp won't succeed the first time
because when it gets to sulphur that's enough to satisfy + as you
found. To get selenium and the rest it must backtrack to get to the
end.

        Hugh