[erlang-questions] builtin regexp functions in Erlang/OTP R12B-3

[Tony Finch]

On Mon, 16 Jun 2008, Robert Virding wrote:

> One quick comment is that I wonder if not part of the problem with PCRE and
> Perl regular expressions is that in one respect they are integrated into
> Perl and contain features to interact with the rest of Perl. If I remember
> correctly, for example, you can set Perl variables directly from the RE. Is
> this what became the named subexprs in PCRE?

Named subpatterns came to PCRE from Python. There isn't a syntax for
setting arbitrary Perl variables from a subpattern (nor is there in
Python). In perl-5.10, which is the first version that supports named
subexpressions, the named captures become values in a hash table. In
Python the MatchObject result has a group() method for accessing captures
by number or name.

Tony.
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