If possible, it's always best to fix the problem at the source. "Regular" expressions are far from regular. As you've already discovered, there are DFA and NFA engines. DFA engines are much faster, but can't match sections of the text to variables. Also, is this alledgedly a PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression)? Is it from egrep or awk? There are many different regular expression engines out there. Someone telling you that "this is a regex" is the same thing as someone handing you code you don't recognize and saying "this is a programming language."

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.

In reply to Re: differnce between egrep and perl regex ? by Ovid
in thread differnce between egrep and perl regex ? by Random_Walk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.