On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 04:56:56PM -0400, Larry Gilson wrote:
> As an > example, an exact count would be matched if I omit the comma.
> /\w{5}/ will match exactly five word characters.
Definitely yes.
> Now if I modify that as /\w{5}?/, I believe that means zero or
> one occurance of five word characters just as /\w{5}+/ should
> mean one or more five word characters. I don't really know if
> this works or not but I believe this is correct.
Sorry, not in my 'man perlre'.
The difference between a pattern
(something){quantified}
and with '?' as
(something){quantified}?
is that the '?' says
'make it the shortest match' ('nongreedy')!
while without it the normal way is the longest match.
There are two 'degenerate' cases:
One is the above 'exact N characters' where the '?' seems to
be useless (the longest or shortest exact N characters :-),
and the other ist the well known '(something)?' which would
be completely useless if not made greedy :-)
But '(something){quantification}?' may have been created
by combining strings and so the '?' is allowed on 'exact'
counts I assume.
Well, this all was in my 'man perlre' and hopefully did
NOT change with the last upgrade from perl5.6 to 5.8?
If it changed please somebody warn me ASAP :-)
Stucki (postmaster at math.fu-berlin.de)
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