I'm working on a program for searching through databases of Latin and Greek text encoded in plain ascii and "binary" bytes. The monster regex that is generated to do the job contains a bunch of possessive quantifiers, so my question is about the difference between the (?>...) expression and the ?+, ++, and *+ quantifiers.
Which of the following is better, and why? Are they equivalent (i.e. do the match the same set of strings and only those strings)? 1. (?:[\x80-\xff]++)?+ 2. (?>[\x80-\xff]++)? In general, should I use the possessive quantifiers or the possessive group (?>...)? Will one generally fail more quickly than the other? Also, does (?>...) capture what it matches? I can't find the answer to this in perlre. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
