From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2003-08-27T06:23:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Specification of Ruby regex?

>>> Ruby's regular expressions are almost identical to Perl's.
>>
>> Except where they are different. The biggest glaring difference is that
>> ^ and $ do not mean "match start of string" and "match end of string"
>>
>>   a.untaint if /^[a-z]+$/ =~ a        # WRONG and maybe dangerous
>>   a.untaint if /\A[a-z]+\z/ =~ a      # right
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Brian.
>>
> what do ^ and $ mean then?  they do match start and end for me.  what 
> else do they match? *shudders at thought of changing lots of code

Correct me if I'm wrong. (Famous last words on most newsgroups.)

Isn't it an issue only in multiline mode? In that case, I think
^ and $ would match the start and end of the line rather than
the entire string.

Hal