Chapter 1 - Regular Expressions - Capturing Data
 

Not sure how to suggest an errata .... or indeed to be proved wrong :)

Page 53, Capturing data, example:-

/('|")[^\1]*?\1/

The notes indicate that the ? is important because you need to make the match lazy so that it matches the first instance and not a "giant quoted string" made up of multiple quoted strings - this seems to me to be wrong.

If you look at the example without the question mark...

/('|")[^\1]*\1/

... you will see that this will NEVER match multiple quoted strings on the same line because the section between the quotes has to match the pattern [^\1]* (i.e any character EXCEPT a quote) - The "giant quoted string" option is therefore not possible because it would have to contain a quote, which clearly it cannot.

Does that make sense?

I am not big on complaining about such things, but since pattern matching is so often misunderstood I felt that this early reference to it in the book needed to be correct.

Here's hoping I got this wrong :)

Moopi