[Gambas-user] Multiline RegExp [slightly OT]

[Rob]

On Wednesday 27 July 2011 07:45, Caveat wrote:
> But if you were to make a commercial product that looked through some
> data, picked out the email addresses (whether it uses regular
> expressions or not to achieve that is irrelevant), high-lighted them and
> allowed the user to perform some action on them... you *could* (in the
> eyes of Apple's lawyers) be infringing on their patent and get pursued
> legally through the courts.

The very first Unix "mail" program did exactly this -- parsing the plain-
text mbox file to find a pattern indicating the start of a message, listing 
the messages for the user and allowing the user to select one -- and 
predates Apple's patent by about two decades.  That they were given it is 
sad, but if they were to try to enforce it against someone with enough 
money to make it worth their while, it's likely they would lose the patent.  
They have many others which are more dangerous, but not as easily used to 
subvert a technical discussion into a political one.

As for the original topic, the way I used to implement a regexp that 
returned a list of results back in my Gambas days was to write a function 
to repeatedly execute the pattern against subsets of the subject string, 
advancing the offset after each successful match.  I wrote the gb.pcre 
component, and if I wrote a mass-match feature in, I've forgotten it.  The 
only lists it returned were lists of submatches, as in if you searched for 
/the (q\S+) (b\S+) (f\S+)/ it would return a list containing the entire 
match, "quick", "brown" and "fox".

Rob