2008/1/15, Paul Stickney <pstickne / gmail.com>:
> You can also expand the alternation all the way through.
> For instance, imagine: (?:\w{X}ed|\w{Y}ing)
> for suitable numeric values of X and Y and applied anchoring.

But this is less efficient with NFA regexp engines because it has to
do more backtracking.  Actually, I believe it is most efficient to
have the longest trailing portion first, e.g. /^\w{7}(?:ing|\wed)$/i.
If you are interested you can play a bit with
http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/.

Kind regards

robert

-- 
use.inject do |as, often| as.you_can - without end