From: Stefan Mueller <flcl@...>
Date: 2001-07-21T06:22:43+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:18199] Pattern Matching takes all Resources

I'm having some big problems with Pattern Matching of Regex.
The example blocks everything in the main thread, for quite a while. 

I don't want the Regex to magically match a String it can't match, but would like to
prevent it from trying forever, as I'm doing this with a big html file in a String.

If it would not block the main thread, and let me realize in the caller that it's taking
too long, I'd be happy too.


ruby 1.6.4 (2001-06-04) [i386-freebsd4.3]

# example
aString = '<img src="http://www.url.com/file.gif"</b>'	# the culprit
aRegEx =  /<(\w*|\s*|\d*|[%=:".,\/?!\-_#]*)*>/			# some HTML TAG Regex
Thread.new { aString =~ aRegEx }						# blocks ca. 20s

---
Stefan Mueller