Regex bug in 5.10 (was: Using Look-ahead and Look-behind)

I think you have found a bug in 5.10's regex handling. The lookahead's greediness or non-greediness should not matter, because it does not consume any characters. When used in a global match, patterns that do not consume characters should advance one character on each match. At least that's how I read the documentation.

The really interesting thing about your version is that you didn't make the capture non-greedy, you made it optional. You probably meant (.*?), which (in pre-5.10) will output empty strings every time. I haven't installed 5.10 myself, so I can't play with it right now.

Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

Comment on Regex bug in 5.10 (was: Using Look-ahead and Look-behind) Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Regex bug in 5.10 (was: Using Look-ahead and Look-behind) by almut (Canon) on May 08, 2009 at 15:06 UTC
...which (in pre-5.10) will output empty strings every time. With 5.10.0, `/(?=(.?))/g;` outputs one* empty string. And I can confirm the behavior reported by jds17 with `/(?=(.*))/g`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Regex bug in 5.10 (was: Using Look-ahead and Look-behind) by jds17 (Pilgrim) on May 08, 2009 at 19:47 UTC
You are right, my change did not affect greediness. The bad thing is: now I don't understand why my proposed solution worked at all. Maybe someone can explain? I don't think the question is too important, but I like to use regular expressions and it bugs me a little if I cannot understand one (especially such a tiny one). I have read the documentation you have cited and it helped, so I played around some more and tried out the following, which only exchanges "+" for "*" in your original expression, really works as one would think and therefore would be my preferred solution, at least for Perl 5.10: `$_ = "Hello"; print "$1\n" while /(?=(.+))/g;` [download] Output: `Hello ello llo lo o` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]