On Sun, Dec 17, 2006 at 11:07:50PM -0800, Yoz Grahame wrote: > On 12/17/06, Robert Rothenberg <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >Bad comparison: traditional regexps are much easier to read than the ones > >used in contemporary programming languages. > > PCRE-style regexp in Javascript: > regexp = /(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}/; > > Traditional POSIX regexp in C: > char regexp[] = "\\([:digit:]\{1,3\}\\.\\)\\{3\\}[:digit:]\\{1,3\\}"; > > The second one is clearly the more horrific of the two hateful messes, > but I'll give you that it's *way* more fun to type if you just can't > get enough joyful bouncing on the backslash key. > (And traditional POSIX holds an even deeper hate - backslashes EITHER > switch a character from being a literal to a metacharacter, OR from a > metacharacter to a literal, depending on the character in question. > Consistency's for suckers, clearly.)
Well, so does Perl, and so your PCRE example. The latter backslashes the d, turning the literal d into a metacharacter, and it backslashes the ., turning the metacharacter . into the literal . Abigail
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