From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2007-03-11T05:17:24+09:00
Subject: Re: A couple of questions from a Ruby neophyte

On Sun, Mar 11, 2007 at 04:42:19AM +0900, Chad Perrin wrote:
> > This is probably a FAQ, but just how different *are* Perl and Ruby regex 
> > capabilities? I'm not a heavy regex user by any stretch of the 
> > imagination. I do the basic stuff that will work anywhere (original 
> > "vi", "grep", "sed", "awk") so Perl and Ruby are overkill for me.
> 
> For the most part, they're pretty similar.  There are a few differences
> that can trip you up, though -- for instance, in Ruby this works for
> matching either foo or bar:
> 
>   /foo|bar/
> 
> . . . whereas in Perl you'd need to do this:
> 
>   /(foo|bar)/

Really?

$ perl -e '$_ = "abcfoodef"; print "match!\n" if /foo|bar/'
match!
$ perl -v | head -3

This is perl, v5.8.7 built for i486-linux-gnu-thread-multi
(with 1 registered patch, see perl -V for more detail)