From: seebs@... (Peter Seebach)
Date: 2007-07-25T04:08:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Regex Question

In message <1185303847.407283.279370@x35g2000prf.googlegroups.com>, seijin@gmai
l.com writes:
>Oh, I see.  So using the "*" with just one ... errr... thing will
>never match it?  "banana" =~ /a*/ will always be 0 but "banana" =~ /
>a*n/ will be 1 (one) ?

Both will match.

The thing to understand is that /X*/ always matches successfully
no matter whether X is anchored or not, is long or a single character,
or what, simply because it can always match the empty string.

If it matches the beginning of a word, it will match greedily, but
it won't go looking for a longer match later instead of taking the first
match it finds.

-s