From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2003-04-27T21:17:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Regexp and $

On Sun, Apr 27, 2003 at 09:05:29PM +0900, ts wrote:
> B> I think this difference in behaviour is unfortunate, as I consider that "^"
> B> and "$" are part of the lowest-common-denominator of regexp behaviour which
> B> ought to be reasonably portable.
> 
>  Why use the broken P implementation ?

I guess I am used to:

    s/[\r\n\s]+$//;   # Strip trailing spaces and newlines

Somehow it seems right to me that $ matches "end of string", perhaps because
a long time ago I did a course which had a more formal definition of regular
expressions, and $ was used to mean end of input stream.

FWIW, awk agrees with Perl:

$ awk -- 'BEGIN { a="abc\n"; gsub("$","z",a); print a }' </dev/null
abc
z

So it seems to me this is an anomoly introduced by Ruby.

Regards,

Brian.