Perl and Regular Expression Repetition

[Akino877]

Hello,

I read on the web that the regular expression /o{2,3}/ means that it would match if o repeats at least 2 times but not more than 3 times. But when I tested this RE
with "halloooo", it returned a match.

I wonder if someone could please help me understand why it returned a match when there was 4 occurences of o?

Thank you,

Akino

[Rabbit]

Because the o does repeat 3 times. It doesn't care about the surrounding characters, no matter what they happen to be. If you want it to match 2-3 consecutive o's and no more than that, you need to bookend the expression with a non-o match.

Something like /[^o]o{2,3}[^o]/