I'm seeing this for the first time now. Sorry for reviving old news.

On 2011-06-03, Brendan Eich wrote:

Kyle Simpson wrote:

I propose a /n flag for regular expressions, which would swap the
default capturing/non-capturing behavior between ( ) and (?: )
operators (that is, ( ) would not capture, and (?: ) would capture).

I like it.
[...]
As with all things RegExp, I wonder what Steve thinks.

I appreciate the vote of confidence! I consider /n to be a medium-strength nice-to-have. In fact, I added it myself in XRegExp v2.0.0-beta. [1]

Concerns:

Kyle called this the noncapturing flag and suggested RegExp.prototype.noncapturing. .NET calls the (?n) flag ExplicitCapture and does not let (?: ) capture. The reason for this is suggested by the name "explicit capture"--with /n, only explicitly named capturing groups of the form (?<name> ) capture a value. IMHO, this is the better way to go, but of course it's dependent on supporting named capture in the first place (as XRegExp does).

Also IMHO, it is better to shelve /n until named capture is added.

Mike Samuel wrote:

Can RegExp flag experimentation be done in library code?

See [1].

--Steven Levithan

[1]: https://github.com/slevithan/XRegExp


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