If you understand backtracking, you won't need to ask such questions. I've recently read Jeffrey Friedl's "Mastering Regular Expressions" (2nd Ed.), and while I knew the key points about pattern matching - even backtracking - already, it helped me put it all together into a bigger image. .* is fine if you know what it means - it just means something very, very different from what people intuitively expect. The star itself is much misunderstood and overused to begin with; you can write much more efficient and precise patterns if you know when not to and when to specifically use it. "Death to Dot Star" touches on the issues (and help me gain much of my pre-book understanding), but it is simply too short to give you a better understand of the big picture.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re: An "ethical" use of dot-star ..? by Aristotle
in thread An "ethical" use of dot-star ..? by Tanalis

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