2008/9/4 Markus Jarderot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > When I first noticed this in Firefox I thought it was a bug. After some > investigation it turns out that the problem was in the specification. > What I am talking about is that ES discards the capturing groups on > repetition. I don't know of any Regexp engine which is not based on the > ECMA-262 standard that behaves like this.
Neither do I, which I pointed out a few times in the prior discussions on the topic. > I don't know if any web application depends on this behavior, but I > wouldn't write any code that did. Well, I'm sure you will find some code out there if you were to spider for it. However, changing the behaviour would: + Make the behaviour match that of regex in other languages, and realign the ECMAScript regex with the Perl regex they are based on. + Make the behaviour more intuitive even for developers without prior experience of regex in other languages or who read regex tutorials that are not language specific. + Increase the overall usefulness of ECMAScript regex by increasing the problem space they can provide solutions within. - Probably break a very small amount of live code. > This problem, and that of back-references to non-participating groups, > have been discussed on this list before, but nothing seems to have come > out of it. > https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2007-September/thread.html#4513 > https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2007-September/thread.html#4574 I also made my argument in <uri:http://web-graphics.com/2007/11/26/ecmascript-3-regular-expressions-a-specification-that-doesnt-make-sense/> and Steven Levithan had already made an argument like it in <uri:http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/npcg-javascript>. I've not seen anything come out of it, which I blame myself for because I raised the issue but didn't enter a ticket on it in trac. Of course, the reason I didn't enter it was that Steven Levithan says in this blog entry <url:http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/es3-regexes-broken> he had planned to submit it but wanted to see where his other regex tickets went first. So it ended up just a mailing list discussion and not much else. -- David "liorean" Andersson _______________________________________________ Es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
