On 9/20/19 9:30 AM, Ilkka Virta wrote:
> On 20.9. 15:48, Greg Wooledge wrote:
>> but after the regex-glob-thing, it says:
>>
>> That means values like ‘aab’ and ‘ aaaaaab’ will match
>>
>> So there's a shift in intent between a? and a+ in what's supposed to be
>> a regular expression. Although of course the sentence is *literally*
>> true because the regex would be unanchored, and therefore it's sufficient
>> to match only the 'ab', and the rest of the input doesn't matter.
>> But that's just confusing, and doesn't belong in this kind of document.
>
> It goes on to say "as will a line containing a 'b' anywhere in its value",
> so the text does recognize the zero-width-matching parts don't affect what
> matches. (I suppose they would affect what goes to BASH_REMATCH[0], but the
> text doesn't mention that.)
The portion of the manual before the example explains BASH_REMATCH and
BASH_REMATCH[0]. It also says "a sequence of characters in the value..."
when describing the pattern. This is the usual behavior of regcomp/regexec
(and grep/egrep, for that matter, since grep will print lines when a
substring matches the supplied pattern).
> I think it would be a better example with the anchored version also
> presented for comparison.
How about saying you can anchor the match with the usual ^ and $ special
pattern characters?
Chet
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU c...@case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
