From: Phrogz <phrogz@...>
Date: 2007-10-27T07:20:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Newlines included in bracket negation

On Oct 26, 3:43 pm, "Jesús Gabriel y Galán" <jgabrielyga...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> There's also something I don't understand, similar to the above.
> I always thought that in a non-multiline regexp, the dot didn't match
> newlines (\n), so I don't understand this:
>
> irb(main):036:0> re = /(h)(.*)(day)/
> => /(h)(.*)(day)/
> irb(main):037:0> "happy\n\nbirthday".match(re).captures
> => ["h", "", "day"]
> irb(main):038:0> re = /(h)(.*)(day)/m
> => /(h)(.*)(day)/m
> irb(main):039:0> "happy\n\nbirthday".match(re).captures
> => ["h", "appy\n\nbirth", "day"]
>
> I thought the first case wouldn't match.
> Can anyone shed some light?

The last four characters of the word "birthday" match the regexp /
h.*day/, without crossing any newlines. Perhaps you were thinking of /
h.+day/, which does not match.