On 05/05/2016 01:47 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
On Thu, 2016-05-05 at 10:31 -0700, Samuel Sieb wrote:
> 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@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.
I fail to see what's odd about it. When you match something with an
optional part it's completely normal.
Thank you for making my point once again...
This is about the case where the entire regexp will match the empty string!