From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2003-04-30T23:31:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby regexp backreferences

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 14:13:10 +0900, ahoward wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Austin Ziegler wrote:
>> I'm doing something that required RLE, and the code that I
>> translated from Perl to do this included the following regexp:
>> 
>> /^(.*?)((.)\2{2,127})(.*?)$/ois
> 
> austin - are you sure this works? it's odd because

>> /^(.*?)((.)\2{2,127})(.*?)$/ois
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> to me this seems to say, "the second match shall be composed of a
> single char followed 2 to 127 of the second match." in otherwords,
> it would seem to be recursive.

No, in fact, I wasn't sure if it worked or not. It was what I found
in the Perl library I was using. I'm supposing that little, if any,
testing was done on the RunLength encoding filter provided, since
that's what was in there. Oh well. Time to file a bug report (:

-austin
-- Austin Ziegler, austin@halostatue.ca on 2003.04.30 at 10:29:07