I think the best solution would be to warn when useless quantifiers are specified. (And, having formed this opinion, it is starting to sound familiar and I think I formed this same opinion the last time this came up.)

That is, /(?-i:hello)/i under -w should complain about something like "regex qualifier i applies to nothing and is ignored" (I hope someone can wordsmith that a bit) while /(?m-x:hi(?-m:lo))/x would complain twice. While /(?i:hi)/i would not complain.

Note that whether the ignoring of the flag has a practical impact is not important -- the warning is that conflicting flags caused flags to be ignored, not whether the flags had or would have had any effect on the regex parts they (would have) applied to.

                - tye

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.