Posted by Jim Michaels on 10/15/97 11:39

"Palle Hansen" <palle@na.invalid> wrote in message
news:43cf4b9b$0$84031$edfadb0f@dtext01.news.tele.dk...
> yawnmoth wrote:
>
>> if (eregi("^[a-z0-9| |\,\-\+\.]+$",$string))
>
>> Why does $string = 'te\st' yield a match? The ereg expression doesn't
>> have a \\ in it...
>
> To have this expression make sence to me, it should look like
>
> if (eregi("^[a-z0-9 ,+.-]+$",$string)){
>
> '-' should be the first og last character
>
> all the special characters looses their meaning in a character class.
> so you acually have 4 maching backslashes in the expression

nope. I just tried it. I've been able to escape things in RE char classes
for a long time. otherwise, you couldn't include things like tabs \t,
whitespace \s, newline \n, return \r and other control characters, word
characters \w, decimal digits \d. We didn't get Perl's character classes
like ::alpha:: (I don't think).

[Back to original message]