Why can I not match against "\w\*" for instance? It just says "infinite" and doe... | Hacker News

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		strictfp on April 5, 2014 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: RegExr 2.0 Why can I not match against "\w*" for instance? It just says "infinite" and does not seem to attempt to match.

gskinner on April 5, 2014 [–]

Creator here - this is because \w* matches 0 characters, and thus matches infinitely. You can roll over the "infinite" error for details, or look in the help.

Try \w+ instead.

strictfp on April 10, 2014 | [–]

But \w* matches "" and "abc" but not "!a". How can I test this with your tool if \w* always says "infinite"?

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