Summary

boundary digit " "

Group #1

"pig"

"cow"

"chicken" "s" boundary

Our expression matches if we can find a path from the left side of the diagram to the right side. We keep a current position in the string, and every time we move through a box, we verify that the part of the string after our current position matches that box.

So if we try to match "the 3 pigs" from position 4, our progress through the flow chart would look like this:

• At position 4, there is a word boundary, so we can move past the first box.

• Still at position 4, we find a digit, so we can also move past the second box.

• At position 5, one path loops back to before the second (digit) box, while the other moves forward through the box that holds a single space character. There is a space here, not a digit, so we must take the second path.

• We are now at position 6 (the start of pigs) and at the three-way branch in the diagram. We don’t see cow or chicken here, but we do see pig, so we take that branch.

• At position 9, after the three-way branch, one path skips the s box and goes straight to the final word boundary, while the other path matches an s. There is an s character here, not a word boundary, so we go through the s box.

• We’re at position 10 (the end of the string) and can match only a word boundary. The end of a string counts as a word boundary, so we go through the last box and have successfully matched this string.

Backtracking

The regular expression /\b([01]+b|[\da-f]+h|\d+)\b/ matches either a binary number followed by a b, a hexadecimal number (that is, base 16, with the letters

157

a to f standing for the digits 10 to 15) followed by an h, or a regular decimal number with no suffix character. This is the corresponding diagram:

group #1

One of: “0” “1” “b”

word boundary

One of: digit

“a” “f” “h” word boundary

digit

When matching this expression, it will often happen that the top (binary) branch is entered even though the input does not actually contain a binary number. When matching the string "103", for example, it becomes clear only at the 3 that we are in the wrong branch. The string does match the expression, just not the branch we are currently in.

So the matcher backtracks. When entering a branch, it remembers its current position (in this case, at the start of the string, just past the first boundary box in the diagram) so that it can go back and try another branch if the current one does not work out. For the string "103", after encountering the 3 character, it will start trying the branch for hexadecimal numbers, which fails again because there is no h after the number. So it tries the decimal number branch. This one fits, and a match is reported after all.

The matcher stops as soon as it finds a full match. This means that if multiple branches could potentially match a string, only the first one (ordered by where the branches appear in the regular expression) is used.

Backtracking also happens for repetition operators like + and *. If you match /^.*x/ against "abcxe", the .* part will first try to consume the whole string. The engine will then realize that it needs an x to match the pattern. Since there is no x past the end of the string, the star operator tries to match one character less. But the matcher doesn’t find an x after abcx either, so it backtracks again, matching the star operator to just abc. Now it finds an x where it needs it and reports a successful match from positions 0 to 4.

It is possible to write regular expressions that will do a lot of backtracking. This problem occurs when a pattern can match a piece of input in many different ways. For example, if we get confused while writing a binary-number

158