On 05/05/2016 10:11 AM, Rick Stevens wrote:
On 05/05/2016 08:56 AM, Samuel Sieb wrote:
> On 05/05/2016 03:35 AM, Ian Malone wrote:
>> On 5 May 2016 at 10:27, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan(a)gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 2016-05-04 at 16:24 -0700, Samuel Sieb wrote:
>>>> Oh, right. I never use a regexp that can match nothing, so I missed
>>>> that. :-)
>>>
>>> You never use '*'?
>>>
>> I guess he meant "match *only* nothing", most of the time using *
>> you'll still use it in combination with a non-empty pattern. Easy to
>> miss that only [something]* can match nothing and therefore first
>> matches at the start of the line.
>>
> Yes, that's what I meant. I can't imagine where that would even be
> useful.
How about looking for "something[0-9]*" so it would match "something"
or
"something0" or "something99". "*" can be useful, you just
have to be
careful.
See, it's such an odd thing to do that people don't understand it. :-)
It's not about using *, I certainly do use that. It's about making a
regexp that can match the empty string.