Re: .*? still greedy (perl,python)?

[Marco Pantaleoni <panta@prosa.it>]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2000 at 02:16:36PM +0300, joost witteveen wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> I noticed that .*? in perl and phython, if used at the beginning
> of an unanchored (without ^) regular expression still behaves half-greedy:
> 
> perl:
>   "hello" =~ /(.*?)l/;
>   print "\$1 = $1\n";
> 
> python:
>   import re
>   r=re.search("(.*?)l","hello")
>   print "$1=",r.group(1)
> 
> In both cases, "he" is printed, while the real minimal match obviously
> would result in an emtpy $1 or r.group(1). This is the behavour
> if I put the (.*?) at the end (ex.: /h(.*?)/)

Why ? The regexp you are using impose the constraint of having an 'l'
following the parentesized subexpression. Only "he" satisfies this
constraint.

Cheers,
Marco

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Marco Pantaleoni, Open Source Developer, Linuxcare Italia spa
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