possible bug in re expression?
Robin Becker
robin at reportlab.com
Mon Apr 28 05:47:54 EDT 2014
On 25/04/2014 19:32, Terry Reedy wrote:
..........
> I suppose that one could argue that '{' alone should be treated as special
> immediately, and not just when a matching '}' is found, and should disable other
> special meanings. I wonder what JS does if there is no matching '}'?
>
well in fact I suspect this is my mistranslation of the original
new RegExp('.{1,' + (+size) + '}', 'g')
my hacked up translator doesn't know what that means. I suspect that (+size) is
an attempt to force size to an integer prior to it being forced to a string. I
used to believe that conversion was always written 0-x, but experimentally
(+"3") ends up as 3 not "3".
Naively, I imagined that re would complain about ambiguous regular expressions,
but in the regexp world n problems --> n+1 problems almost surely so I should
have anticipated it :)
Does this in fact that almost any broken regexp specification will silently fail
because re will reset and consider any metacharacter as literal?
--
Robin Becker
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