You have good answers to your question above. Now, please consider the manner of your asking.

IMO, you're apt to confuse readers -- especially the newcomers whose education is a major goal of the Monastery -- by posting pseudocode without clear indication that that's what it is. And for something this simple, the Monastery's standard is (slightly paraphrased) post a snippet of compilable, executable code (cf: How do I post a question effectively?).

Omitting semi-colons and regex delimiters merely obfuscates; including them (and the other niceties of compilable code) would cost you very little but would provide the community much greater ease of reading.

In reply to Re: using just variables in a regular exression by ww
in thread using just variables in a regular exression by sdetweil

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