On Mar 7, 2020, at 5:12 AM, Roland Küffner <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> It is a little confusing or unintuitive(*), that the pattern FINDS both
> instances but only CAPTURES the last one. But once you understand the
> mechanism it is a lot easier to construct working patterns.
I think it may make more sense if you think that you get one capture group for
result for each parenthesized subexpression in the regular expression. That is,
the set of capture groups maps onto the text of the regular expression as it is
written.
Since, because of repetition, a parenthesized expression may match multiple
substrings when the pattern is actually applied, that leaves the question of
which of the matches for a subexpression is actually captured. The choice is
somewhat arbitrary, but from a purely practical point of view, if the first
match was captured, there would, in general, be no way to get the last match;
but if the last match is captured, you can always get the first ,match as well
with a little recoding of the regular expression.
Regards,
Neil Faiman
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