On 18/05/18 13:30, The Sidhekin wrote: > On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 12:51 PM, Timo Paulssen <t...@wakelift.de > <mailto:t...@wakelift.de>> wrote: > > character classes are fundamentally the wrong thing for "phrases", > since they describe only a character. > > > You were right the first time.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here? > [...] > > Somewhat interesting exercise, but this kind of rephrasing doesn't > scale well for longer phrases, is hard to automate (given a phrase, > which character classes need we use?), and it's already pretty hard to > read. That's true, it's probably not sensible to do every regex this way. I'm not sure how I could have done it better, though. > If this requirement needs to be expressed in a single regex, here's > what I'd use (quickly translated from Perl5, then tested to get rid of > translation errors): > > /<!before .* gm> ^ <[d..z]>* $/ > > ... or, with comments: > > /<!before .* gm> # not containing the phrase "gm" anywhere from here, > ^ <[d..z]>* $ # match the whole string, containing only letters d > through z > / That's pretty good! Putting the beginning-of-string anchor ^ anywhere but the very start is surely an advanced move :) - Timo
