http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=1922 ------- Additional Comments From liam@w3.org 2005-09-01 00:43 ------- The Perl documentation is useful here (it had to happen once). The "perldoc perlre" page says, [[ The "/x" modifier itself needs a little more explanation. It tells the regular expression parser to ignore whitespace that is neither back‐ slashed nor within a character class. You can use this to break up your regular expression into (slightly) more readable parts. The "#" character is also treated as a metacharacter introducing a comment, just as in ordinary Perl code. This also means that if you want real whitespace or "#" characters in the pattern (outside a character class, where they are unaffected by "/x"), that you'll either have to escape them or encode them using octal or hex escapes. Taken together, these features go a long way towards making Perl's regular expressions more readable. ]] I believe this is a sensible and appropriate definition, and means that [ ] matches a single space (and also, for Perl, that you can't put comments inside character classes). It's not clear to me how to allow host-language comments inside a regular expression, and I think that should be up to the host language to specify, rather than using Perl's # comments. So just take the whitespace part of this. LiamReceived on Thursday, 1 September 2005 00:43:30 UTC
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