From: ser@... (Sean Russell)
Date: 2002-09-18T08:28:39+09:00
Subject: Regular expression bug, or feature?

I've got a strange feeling that this is one of those little bits of
knowledge known to everybody except people who think they know
something about regular expressions knows... but here goes:

I have a regular expression and a string which cause Ruby to hang. 
Try this:

src='<hosted class="com.firsthop.mg.gui.Servlet" product="TestSuite"
classpath'
src =~ /^<((?:[\w:][-\w\d.]*:)?[\w:][-\w\d.]*)\s*((((["']).*?\5)|[^\/'">]*)*?)(\/)?>/mu

Notice that there's a CR between %q{"TestSuite"} and %q{classpath}.

This hangs on at least Ruby 1.6.5 and 1.6.7 -- one of those 100% CPU,
never return hangs.

Is this a known problem with Ruby, or should I file a bug report?

I've checked this in Perl; it doesn't match, of course, but neither
does it hang.