From: "Januski, Ken" <kjanuski@...>
Date: 2008-04-03T11:23:47+09:00
Subject: Re: confused by 'test'.gsub(/.*/,'x')

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Right you are. For all the years I've used Perl, and for all that I =
thought I knew about regexes, I never would have thought I would get =
that result.

I would have expected one greedy match for the entire text. Instead I =
guess it's first getting the zero match and then the full match.



-----Original Message-----
From: Jens Wille [mailto:jens.wille@uni-koeln.de]
Sent: Wed 4/2/2008 7:03 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: confused by 'test'.gsub(/.*/,'x')
=20
Januski, Ken [2008-04-03 00:08]:
> Of course my background is Perl and I believe that's how it would
> work there.
no, works the same way there:

  sh> perl -e '$s =3D "test"; $s =3D~ s/.*/x/g; print "$s\n"'
  xx

(only a lot more complicated ;-)

btw: python, php and javascript, too.

oh, and here's what oniguruma does:

  irb> Oniguruma::ORegexp.new('.*').gsub('test', 'x')
  =3D>"xx"

cheers
jens



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