Overall looking very good Manichean, sorry about the late review. Not sure that backreferences are really required, but you poked some fun at that, so fine by me.
Shouldn't this be two separate paragraphs?:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Manichean
("Whitespace" is a term for anything that won't be printed. These characters include space, tabulator, line feed, form feed and carriage return.) As a last note on sets, you can also define a set as any character but those in the set. You do that by including the character "^" as the very first character in the set.
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This is actually incorrect, (1|2)+ will match all those strings. A group doesn't get 'locked' based on the first character it matches.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Manichean
Consider the group "(1|2)" and the set "[12]"- without quantifiers, each will only match either the character "1" or the character "2". But, if you append them with a quantifier, they behave quite distinct: "(1|2)+" will match e.g. the string "1111" or "222", but not the string "12212"- once the group has selected a character, it cannot select another one.
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