From: Phrogz <gavin@...>
Date: 2007-03-17T23:40:07+09:00
Subject: Re: A couple of questions from a Ruby neophyte

On Mar 10, 1:34 am, "gga" <GGarram...@aol.com> wrote:
> On 8 mar, 09:08, "planetthoughtful" <planetthought...@gmail.com>
> As you asked in the Ruby list, and Perl/Python/Ruby were mentioned,
> I'll give you answers for them.

An excellent, informative post. Thanks for sharing!

One question:
> Ruby1.8's regexp engine is less powerful than Perl's or Python's as it
> does not have backtracking, named groups or unicode (if you don't know
> what that is or care, ruby1.8's regexp are perfect for you already).

If I understand the terminology correctly, the 1.8 regexp engine
doesn't support lookbehind assertions (positive or negative), but it
does support backtracking. Isn't backtracking what permits /.*bar/ to
match "foobar"? Without backtracking, .* would match "foobar", and
then the regexp would fail when it didn't find another "bar" after
"foobar".