<Jan.Hermelink@metalogic.de> wrote:
It looks more like a bug than by design if you ask me.
I don't think so - this behaviour is specified in the standardization proposal. To quote from http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2003/n1429.htm, Chapter "RE.8.2 Template class regex_token_iterator":
"If the end of sequence is reached (regex_search returns false), the iterator becomes equal to the end-of-sequence iterator value, unless the sub-expression being enumerated has index -1: In which case the iterator enumerates one last string that contains all the characters from the end of the last regular expression match to the end of the input sequence being enumerated, provided that this would not be an empty string."
!!! "provided that this would not be an empty string" !!!
How about this string: "/abc/abc". Would this result in "", "abc", "abc"? Yes
Yet "abc/abc/" would result in "abc", "abc"? Yes
That seems terribly unbalanced to me, and this is not the behavior I would expect. Yes, you may have a point here.
Or is it somewhat modeled after the C++ initializer syntax: { a, b, } is the same as { a, b } but { , a, b } isn't the same ... Maybe John can commence? Jan