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in reply to Death to Dot Star!

I bet your friend still hasn't learnt regexes. I think It's often the case when they (friends) mention they'd like to learn regexes, it realy means that they'd like a magic wand to wave over them so they become regex wizards. btw the greedy behavior of dot star is well known, so if it's taken into consideration there's usually no problem. dot star is best used in conjunction with unique delimiters on either/both sides of it. Chris

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Re: Re: Death to Dot Star!
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 03, 2003 at 12:19 UTC
    You obviously have not understood the (sometimes catastrophic) performance issues that backtracking can cause. True story. I once saw a person who should have split on the comma instead try to use /(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*),(.*)/ to pull his data out. Even though this was guaranteed to work on his dataset, he thought that Perl was slow because this performed so pathetically.