Re: [DOC PATCH] Regex \G and POSIX restrictions

Message-Id: <200203291653.g2TGrRp26588@crypt.compulink.co.uk>

p4raw-id: //depot/perl@15608

2 files changed, 7 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/pod/perlre.pod b/pod/perlre.pod
index fef8ce3b6f..f2ce3ffff1 100644
--- a/pod/perlre.pod
+++ b/pod/perlre.pod
@@ -349,8 +349,11 @@ It is also useful when writing C<lex>-like scanners, when you have
 several patterns that you want to match against consequent substrings
 of your string, see the previous reference.  The actual location
 where C<\G> will match can also be influenced by using C<pos()> as
-an lvalue.  Currently C<\G> only works when used at the
-beginning of the pattern. See L<perlfunc/pos>.
+an lvalue: see L<perlfunc/pos>. Currently C<\G> is only fully
+supported when anchored to the start of the pattern; while it
+is permitted to use it elsewhere, as in C</(?<=\G..)./g>, some
+such uses (C</.\G/g>, for example) currently cause problems, and
+it is recommended that you avoid such usage for now.
 
 The bracketing construct C<( ... )> creates capture buffers.  To
 refer to the digit'th buffer use \<digit> within the
diff --git a/pod/perlretut.pod b/pod/perlretut.pod
index 4ea9ecc497..f0b5d1d389 100644
--- a/pod/perlretut.pod
+++ b/pod/perlretut.pod
@@ -1403,7 +1403,8 @@ off.  C<\G> allows us to easily do context-sensitive matching:
 
 The combination of C<//g> and C<\G> allows us to process the string a
 bit at a time and use arbitrary Perl logic to decide what to do next.
-Currently, the C<\G> anchor only works at the beginning of a pattern.
+Currently, the C<\G> anchor is only fully supported when used to anchor
+to the start of the pattern.
 
 C<\G> is also invaluable in processing fixed length records with
 regexps.  Suppose we have a snippet of coding region DNA, encoded as