Re^3: Roughly matching an ipv6 address with sql wildcard

The extra parens are needed in order for the anchors to do what you want. The OP regex was really saying: "if the string STARTS with an IPv6 string, OR if it ENDS with something that contains one or more IP address characters and/or percent signs".

BTW, you might want to include underscore as a possible sql wildcard character, because it is (and can be very useful in certain cases).

Comment on Re^3: Roughly matching an ipv6 address with sql wildcard

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Re^4: Roughly matching an ipv6 address with sql wildcard by neilwatson (Priest) on Sep 10, 2015 at 12:16 UTC
Does that mean that \A and \Z bind more tightly than \| and if so, where is this precedence listed? Neil Watson watson-wilson.ca	[reply]
Re^5: Roughly matching an ipv6 address with sql wildcard by graff (Chancellor) on Sep 10, 2015 at 14:12 UTC
Everything is explained in the perlre man page. The first subsection under "Regular Expressions" is "Metacharacters", where it should be clear that there is no difference in "precedence" between anchors and the alternation operator (\A and \Z are just variations on ^ and $). In fact, it's not so much a matter of "binding" or "precedence", but rather an issue of "grouping" (via parens, which are also explained in that same section).	[reply]