At 05:11 PM 9/27/05 -0700, $Bill Luebkert wrote: >\s* means to grab any WS at the current position (including the case where > there is none). > >\s*? means 0 or 1 of the above which is totally meaningless - you've already > eaten all the WS with the \s*, so in my opinion the ? is redundant to > what you have already done.
Redundant vs. Useless! Semantic battle of the century!! Who's right and who's wrong: and will be put to DEATH! Redundant: m/\s*\s/; # Specifying something again when it was already specified Useless: m/xyz\s*?$/; # Specifying something that does nothing * maximal match, eat up as many characters as possible to make the overall expression match *? minimal match, eat up as few characters as possible to make the overall expression match That rule doesn't disappear just because a certain character sequence was specified. *? is only *useful* when used with wildcards since it will decay to a nul if used with a fixed string. The minimum of the range 0 to inf is 0. -- REMEMBER THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ---=< WTC 911 >=-- "...ne cede malis" 00000100 _______________________________________________ Perl-Win32-Users mailing list Perl-Win32-Users@listserv.ActiveState.com To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs
