From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2007-01-26T23:30:10+09:00
Subject: Re: simple question about Ruby Regext

On 26.01.2007 15:00, Alex Young wrote:
> Peter Bailey wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I've been learning RUBY the past 7 months or so, and, now, my assistant
>> is doing the same. In her perusal of the "Programming RUBY" book, first
>> edition, she's come across a simple, simple regex truism that throws
>> her, and throws me, too!
>>
>> Why is this true?
>>
>> "banana" =~ /an*/
>> =>1
>>
>> This is driving me nuts. Why isn't the RUBY response "=>2?" There are
>> two "an" stubs in "banana."
> The number returned is the position of the start of match, not the 
> number of them.
> 
>> I thought that RUBY, like PERL, is inherently greedy and it would find
>> all instances of said regex expression.
> It is...  there's only one match, and it matches everything from the 
> first 'a' to the end of the string.

No.  It's just matching "an":

irb(main):001:0> "banana"[/an*/]
=> "an"

You were right if the regexp had a dot:

irb(main):002:0> "banana"[/an.*/]
=> "anana"

	robert