On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 16:01:48 +0100, Tom Allison <tallison / tacocat.net>  
wrote:

> dblack / wobblini.net wrote:
>>  /s turns on SJIS encoding, so you probably don't want that.  As for
>> all the multiline matching, etc., /m causes the wildcard dot to match
>> newline characters, like /s in Perl.  You don't need an equivalent of
>> Perl's /m because ^ and $ already always match beginning/end of lines.
>> To match beginning/end of string, you use anchors: \A and \z (or \Z to
>> discount a final newline).
>
> There's a lot of differences to get used to here.
> I'm surprised that Ruby would go contrary to Perl in the regex flags.  
> It's bound to be a source of confusion, at least for myself.
>


AND here's a completely new regexp engine coming for 2.0 - fun for the  
whole family.

That said, although it's undesirable, noone's obliged to be completely  
PCRE-compatible, and it always pays to take five minutes to read the (IMO  
pretty clear as far as regexps are concerned) documentation.