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Why Do Regexes Use `$` and `^` as Line Anchors?

posted by janrinok on Wednesday March 27, @08:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-didn't-know-that-... dept.

owl writes:

https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/why-do-regexes-use-and-as-line-anchors/

Last week I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole: why do regular expressions use $ and ^ as line anchors?1

This talk brings up that they first appeared in Ken Thompson's port of the QED text editor. In his manual he writes: b) "^" is a regular expression which matches character at the beginning of a line.

c) "$" is a regular expression which matches character before the character (usually at the end of a line)

QED was the precursor to ed, which was instrumental in popularizing regexes, so a lot of its design choices stuck.

Okay, but then why did Ken Thompson choose those characters?

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday March 28, @04:40PM

    by VLM (445) on Thursday March 28, @04:40PM (#1350714)

    It's been a battle for decades now, that source code should either be like literature or prose with short lines for the casual reader vs source code should be like a math formula where stretching one unitary concept into unneeded extra steps or extra lines is mere obfuscation to be avoided for the simplicity of one line for one concept.

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