#3454 Regex anomaly

[Heklaz]

jEdit version 4.3.2

A regular expression like ^\S+\s*Problem\s*:.*$ which should anchor to start and end of line matches too much.

See attached screen shot. Because it is a repeated pattern, (far) too many matches are found.

The same regex in java matches only lines like (on the same input file):
a) Problem : xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
b) Problem : zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
c) Problem : vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
d) Problem : wwwwwwwwwwwwwww

[Heklaz]

Screen shot of jEdit regex and match

[Björn Kautler]

I guess what you really want to do is using the following pattern:

^[\s&&[^\n]]*Problem\s*:.*$

The screenshot looks perfectly fine to me. The anchor matches at one linestart, then you match at least one non-whitespace and then an arbitratry amount of whitespace (newline is also a whitespace). If you would enable dot-all mode, you would even get more matched at the end, because then the "." would match newlines also.