I expect the regex pattern ab{,2}c
to match only with a
followed by 0, 1 or 2 b
s, followed by c
.
It works that way in lots of languages, for instance Python. However, in R:
grepl("ab{,2}c", c("ac", "abc", "abbc", "abbbc", "abbbbc"))
# [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE FALSE
I'm surprised by the 4th TRUE
. In ?regex
, I can read:
{n,m}
The preceding item is matched at leastn
times, but not more thanm
times.
So I agree that {,2}
should be written {0,2}
to be a valid pattern (unlike in Python, where the docs state explicitly that omitting n
specifies a lower bound of zero).
But then using {,2}
should throw an error instead of returning misleading matches! Am I missing something or should this be reported as a bug?
The behavior with {,2}
is not expected, it is a bug. If you have a look at the TRE source code, tre_parse_bound
method, you will see that the min
variable value is set to -1
before the engine tries to initialize the minimum bound. It seems that the number of "repeats" in case the minimum value is missing in the quantifier is the number of maximum value + 1
(as if the repeat number equals max - min = max - (-1) = max+1
).
So, a{,}
matches one occurrence of a
. Same as a{, }
or a{ , }
. See R demo, only abc
is matched with ab{,}c
:
grepl("ab{,}c", c("ac", "abc", "abbc", "abbbc", "abbbbc"))
grepl("ab{, }c", c("ac", "abc", "abbc", "abbbc", "abbbbc"))
grepl("ab{ , }c", c("ac", "abc", "abbc", "abbbc", "abbbbc"))
## => [1] FALSE TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE
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