"John Maddock" <john@johnmaddock.co.uk> writes:
The expression you're using can match a zero-length string, so after it's matched the ".cidl" suffix, it then finds a second match of zero-length immediately afterwards, hense the two copies of "E.idl" in the output string.
The original expression is "(\.(idl|cidl|cdl))?$". Doesn't '$' at the end means that this expression by definition cannot match two things in a single string (since a string has only one end)?
I'm afraid this dark corner was/is under-documented in the docs, but the TR1 text (with which this version is intended to conform) is quite clear that this is the required behaviour.
For what it's worth, perl on my box (5.8.7) also think there is only one match. But I guess C++ TR1 is more authoritative when it comes to regular expressions (sorry, couldn't resist sarcasm when it comes to Std C++).
As a workaround, you could specify format_first_only in the format flags (assuming you're replacing the suffix on a single filename), or you could use an expression like:
(.)(\\.(idl|cidl|cdl))?$
Following the logic above it will match all single letters in the string, no? The following seems to work thought: "^(.+?)(\.(idl|cidl|cdl))?$" Thanks for your help, -boris