Newbie with RegEx question

[Randal L. Schwartz]

>>>>> "MarkyMoon" == MarkyMoon  <markmoon at teleport.com> writes:

MarkyMoon>  Now that things are starting to make a little more sense to me,
MarkyMoon> I've been going through the llama book (again) and I'm having a bit
MarkyMoon> of a problem understanding why 

MarkyMoon> (abc)* 

MarkyMoon> will match a null set  "" (in addition to abc,abcabc, abcabcabc
MarkyMoon> etc.)...

By definition.  zero or more times.  zero is one of that. :)

MarkyMoon>  and WHY would you WANT to define a pattern that has the
MarkyMoon> possiblility of matching nothing?

Why would you want to define a pattern that matches
/my hovercraft is full of eels/ ?

Or stated in a different way, why would you want to make an exception
to the rules, and if so, how would you except it?  It'd be like
defining a programming language that could only make "sensible"
programs, and disallowed "$a = $a;".  It's just not really practical
to have those exceptions.

By the way /^/ also matches a null string, but only if it occurs at
the beginning of the string.  Similarly, /$/ also matches a null
string, but only if it occurs at the end of the target string.  So be
careful when you start disallowing null string matches. :)

-- 
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