Posted by John Dunlop on 09/18/05 12:01

romain.jouin@gmail.com wrote:

> Yannick Benoit a écrit :
>
>>[:space:]*(href)[:space:]*=[:space:]*([^ >]+)

A named character class, itself inside a character class, has to be
wrapped in '[:' and ':]'. So here you would have /[[:space:]]/. The
Manual does not document this for PCREs.

What you have at the moment, in a POSIX regular expression, are
ordinary character classes. (You'd get an error if you tried that in
a PCRE.) Since they don't match US-ASCII spaces, the only way the
pattern could match is if the subject string doesn't have spaces at
those points.

> [ ]*href[ ]*=[ ]*([^>]+)

A character class consisting of a single character means the same if
you remove its square brackets. The classes are superfluous.

/ */ and /[[:space:]]*/ don't necessarily have the same meaning.
The latter likely matches the usual whitespace characters, the former
only US-ASCII spaces.

--
Jock

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