From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-03-11T06:46:25+09:00
Subject: Re: A couple of questions from a Ruby neophyte

On Sun, Mar 11, 2007 at 05:17:24AM +0900, Brian Candler wrote:
> 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)

Wow.  All this time, I thought the parentheses were necessary.

Funny.

Thanks for disabusing me of that notion.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"Real ugliness is not harsh-looking syntax, but having to
build programs out of the wrong concepts." - Paul Graham