regexp: how to match a null string?

[Chris Pressey]

Hello again.

The regexp behaviour seems very weird to me.
In my mind, "^(.*)$" should match a null string.
It doesn't match any characters, but it's still a valid match.
But because regexp deals only in terms of characters matched -
there's no way to tell!

Erlang (BEAM) emulator version 5.2.3.3 [source] [hipe]

Eshell V5.2.3.3  (abort with ^G)
1> S = "".
[]
2> P = "^(.*)$".
"^(.*)$"
3> regexp:match(S, P).
nomatch
4> regexp:first_match(S, P).
nomatch
5> regexp:matches(S, P).
{match,[]}
6> regexp:matches("foo", "bar").
{match,[]}

Would anyone else be interested in a function like

  regexp:is_match(String, RegExp) -> true | false

?  Or is there a better way to solve this problem?

-Chris