From: "Marcin Mielżyński" <lopexx@...>
Date: 2006-02-13T05:38:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Cutting a piece of text

David Vallner wrote:

> The nongreedy match has to "back up" and retry on every character after the 
> tag name, whileas James' [^>] doesn't ever have to back up. In fact, even a 
> greedy .* would probably be faster than a nongreedy one in this case.
> 
> Gotta love the black art that is optimizing regexps.
> 

Ooops.. You are right!

But as I read greedy quantifiers do backtrack as well (but not in the 
case above).

/a+aa/ =~ "aaaaa"
will backtrack two characters

only possesive quantifier (in oniguruma e.g.) consumes in the real, 
greedy way.

so
/a++aa/ =~ "aaaaa"
won't match.

lopex