Why are bugs from September still untouched?

[Dave Cragg]

At 3:12 pm -0700 14/1/04, Dar Scott wrote:
>On Wednesday, January 14, 2004, at 10:39 AM, Dave Cragg wrote:
>
>>
>>  Just out of interest, is "(?>x)*" a valid regular expression? If
>>so, what does it do?
>
>Yes.  It is a non-backtracking, non-capturing group.
>Non-backtracking has many uses, but I use it especially to keep
>match failures from taking a very long time.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was wondering about the purpose of the * 
immediately following the extended expression. I couldn't understand 
its function. I thought extended expressions of the form (?...) were 
self-contained, and couldn't be followed by "repeat" metacharacters. 
(But I only discovered extended expressions recently, and have rarely 
used them.) I could understand "(?>x*)" or "(?>x).*" but not "(?>x)*".

But after mucking around, it looks like "(?>x*)" and "(?>x)*" do the 
same. Am I right? But "(?>x*)" seems a lot faster.

By the way, I still don't get any crash or error with your script.

Cheers
Dave