Ed Sabol wrote,
| I must say that I really do not like this "feature", either documented or
| undocumented. If the regexp engine can be modified to only strip leading
| newlines from MATCHed regexps starting with "^", I would find that acceptable
| (if inconsistent). But if that's too complicated and it's a choice between
| always stripping a leading newline from MATCH and not stripping at all under
| any circumstances, then I vote strongly for not stripping at all.
I'm with Ed. Users should be able to control whether leading newlines get
into $MATCH or not. It is very easy to place the "\/" extraction operator
*after* "^" or to make sure that the right side starts with "." or ".+" when
we don't want the newline included. The only thing is that an opening puta-
tive newline, like a trailing one, should not get into $MATCH, because it
isn't really there in the search area.
[The leading backslash problem is reason enough that I've always put "\/"
after "^" anyway when I want $MATCH to start at the beginning of a line.]