From: David Alan Black <dblack@...>
Date: 2002-07-27T21:10:57+09:00
Subject: Re: regex: move minus sign to front for negative numbers w trailing " -"

Hello --

On Sat, 27 Jul 2002, [iso-8859-1] "Pe�a, Botp" wrote:

> 		puts (line.gsub ( /(\b)((\d+)|(\d+\.\d+))(-)/,
> '>>\5\1\2<<'))

I don't know why I bother trying to hammer out answers to questions
like this when it's still daylight in Paris.... :-) but anyway, I just
wanted to make one observation, for possible future reference.

Namely: there's no point capturing a \b match and backreferencing it,
because it's just a zero-width assertion.  It doesn't actually match
or consume a character in the string; it's just a constraint on the
upcoming attempted match.


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav