Re: regex help

Just a note on the greediness mentioned here...

My understanding is that the greediness of a regular expression is 
only an 
issue when you are capturing the values of sub-patterns within the 
target 
data.  (e.g. in Perl 'ML123' =~ /ML(\d+)/; captures 123 into $1.)  
When only 
doing matching, eventually, if possible, the pattern will be matched 
irrespective of whether greedy or non-greedy matching is used.

Greediness just affects whether the regular expression engine attempts 
to 
grab lots of content for a sub-expression in it's first attempt and 
them 
back track, or attempts to capture the minimal amount in its first 
attempt 
and then forward track (not sure if that's a proper term!).

If anyone's opinion differs, please let me know

Received on Sunday, 21 January 2007 23:43:41 UTC