On Tue, 5 Dec 2006 16:22:16 -0800 (PST), Dharma Wolford dharmawolford@yahoo.com wrote:
In the following examples the double-quotes are only included for clarity, I'm not actually entering them into The Regex Coach.
Here are two regexes I'm trying: ##################### "\A*7[0-9][0-9]" "^*7[0-9][0-9]" #####################
And these are lines of data I'm trying those against: ######################## " 758" " 759" " 760" ########################
Now what I'm expecting (and want) to happen is the leading blank space(s) on the left of the numbers, as well as the three digit numbers themselves, to be highlighted as a match.
What DOES happen with both regexes is that the three digit numbers are highlighted, but not the leading blank spaces.
From your description, I think what you actually want are regular
expressions like these:
##################### "\A *7[0-9][0-9]" "^ *7[0-9][0-9]" #####################
The fact that your regexes match at all is counter-intuitive IMHO, but it matches with what Perl does (which was one of the design goals of CL-PPCRE): \A or ^ should only match the beginning of the string, but the asterisk somehow "extends" this.
I agree that if there's a match, it should be highlighted completely, so I will try to fix this in the next release, but I'm pretty busy right now, and I don't consider this to be high priority (i.e. a severe bug).
Thanks for the report, Edi.