On Tuesday 29 April 2008 17:58, David C. Rankin wrote:
Listmates:
With regular expressions, what is the difference between \< and \b ? The man page says:
Which man page? There are many, many programs and libraries that implement regular-expression matching, and REs are by no means singly defined. There are many grammars for notating them and many varieties of fundamental matching constructs.
"The symbols \< and \> respectively match the empty string at the beginning and end of a word. The symbol \b matches the empty string at the edge of a word..."
What is the difference between being at the "beginning or end" of a word or at the "edge" of a word? Presuming that "The (word) symbol \w is a synonym for [[:alnum:]]"
Well, beginnings happen only at the beginning. Ends happen only at the end. Boundaries are either. (Am I going too fast for you??)
The concept eludes me.....
I wasn't aware of any RE system that implements both the "directional" word boundaries (\< and \>) and the neutral one (\b). Personally, I prefer the old-style \< and \> but apparently they're a thing of the past.
-- David C. Rankin
Randall Schulz Nobody -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org