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Reply-to: jim.robinson@stanford.edu
From:	"James A. Robinson" <jim.robinson@stanford.edu>
To:	"kim kubik" <chaotrope@jps.net>
cc:	"sam Fans" <sam-fans@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu>
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Subject: Re: the obvious. =) 
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   of "Sat, 25 Mar 2000 15:47:54 PST."References: <01bf96b4$8a262aa0$7dc9efd1@pkwksj.sjna.corp.dom> 
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Date:	Sat, 25 Mar 2000 20:51:46 -0500
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> >,x/^\/\*(.+\n)+ \*\/\n/ t /}\n/
>
> this just ran up against my (mis)understanding of 
> sam's regexp's. I'm sure when first using sam I did
> something similar to your example above and the
> 'greedy' little bastard (.+\n)+ would (to my way
> of thinking) eat the whole file, that is, never see
> the closing */ of the commment because the .+ should
> just keep on going.


Here's what I *think* is going on, but I'm no regex guru...  A '(.*\n)+'
would keep it going to the end of the file. With '(.+\n)+' I'm specifying
that there must be at least one character before the newline. So this
match ends at the first blank line.  I think the engine then backtracks
until it finds a match for ' \*\/' -- which is the end of the comment. I
believe the previous match of a newline ensures that it will not hit the
comments within the blocks (as those are '\n\t *').

And yes, I do space indent my comments so the '*' lines up with the
topmost one.  I thought that was in my post, though I did tab-indent
the whole block. Perhaps my mailer munged it.


Jim