Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!mcnc!uvaarpa!mmdf
From: worley@compass.com (Dale Worley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Changing the first character of a string.
Message-ID: <1990Jul5.135434.11674@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 5 Jul 90 13:54:34 GMT
Sender: mmdf@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU (Uvaarpa Mail System)
Reply-To: worley@compass.com
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 24


   From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)

   You'll have to ask the designers of C that question.  Perl isn't treating
   it at all specially here--it's just relying on the convention that normal
   text never contains it.  /[^\0]/ is just an idiom for matching any textual
   character including newline, which /./ specifically won't match.

Sounds like a good way to get screwed if the string actually contains
a NUL.  Why not "(.|\n)"?

   But what about multi-character delimiters such as C comments?

Well, my preference is something like

   .* \- .*/\*.*

(exploiting the fact that the complement of a regular language is
regular), but nobody implements that.

Dale Worley		Compass, Inc.			worley@compass.com
--
Software without hardware is an idea.
Hardware without software is a space heater.