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Re: alternation option end of string





On 2026-05-03 11:45, Bart Schaefer wrote:
On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 6:56 AM Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It might not actually be the '$' just some mechanism for matching a
string that must end after some substring.
That's not what you're asking for, tho.  You're asking for the entire
string to fail to match if there's anything after the substring, but
in the same pattern you want the substring itself to match so you can
extract it.  You can't simultaneously have a failure and a success.
That's why Roman's solution has (compare && out=success ||
out=failure) -- there's no single pattern expression that can do both
branches.  (There might be a perl expression that works, but I'm not
confident pcre is perl-ish enough to do it.)
I thought the thing was logically possible because it can be articulated: 'cat' then either nothing || an 's' which can itself be followed by anything.  But if it's not doable, as I said, no matter cuz the functionality is there and I'd do it Roman's way anyway cuz it's self-explanatory.  Too much terseness already, so I wish for more terseness very lightly.  Sorta like a while back I was wondering if:
(( x > 5 )) && x=5
... had a more compact syntax -- if not so what, it's not a problem, still, sometimes zsh offers these little shortcuts.







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