Negative lookbehind assertion error

[anonymous]

As soon as you include an OR-expression inside a negative lookbehind assertion, you get wrong results. Not sure if this is a bug, but I've tested this with multiple engines and I get different results.

---

Regex: (?<!foo|bar) \(

String: test bar (

NO MATCH (expected)

---

Regex: (?<!food|bar) \(

String: test bar (

MATCH (NOT expected)

---

Regex: (?<!fo|bar) \(

String: test bar (

MATCH (NOT expected)

---

This really makes it hard to match certain strings :(

[Steven Watanabe]

According to ​http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#Extended-Patterns, the latter two are not allowed. (I believe that the default behavior of Boost.Regex is to match perl)

[anonymous]

I wouldn't be too sure.

(?<!pattern) A zero-width negative look-behind assertion. For example /(?<!bar)foo/ matches any occurrence of "foo" that does not follow "bar". Works only for fixed-width look-behind.

Both foo and bar are fixed-width, so ORing them should also be fixed width. There is no quantifier used in the sample.

For comparison, in .NET, System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex does it 'right'. The .NET regular expression engine is designed to be mostly compatible with Perl 5 regular expressions. Hmmm?

[anonymous]

Expressions 2 and 3 should have been rejected - they're not supported either by Perl or by Boost.Regex. Will fix shortly, John.

[John Maddock]

(In [62563]) Some lookbehind assertions were accepted when they should not have been. Fixes #4309.