Explicitly spell out the ranges involved. The original wording always confused me, but it's actually very sane. Also change the [0]. to -> here to make more obvious the point that pmatch is used as a pointer-to-object, not array in this scenario. Remove "this doesn't change R_NOTBOL & R_NEWLINE" ‒ so does it change R_NOTEOL? No. That's weird and confusing. String largeness doesn't matter, known-lengthness does. Explicitly spell out the influence on returned matches (relative to string, not start of range). Signed-off-by: Ahelenia Ziemiańska --- man3/regex.3 | 33 ++++++++++++++++++++------------- 1 file changed, 20 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-) diff --git a/man3/regex.3 b/man3/regex.3 index b4feaba19..00e7e2c6b 100644 --- a/man3/regex.3 +++ b/man3/regex.3 @@ -131,23 +131,30 @@ compilation flag above). .TP .B REG_STARTEND -Use -.I pmatch[0] -on the input string, starting at byte -.I pmatch[0].rm_so -and ending before byte -.IR pmatch[0].rm_eo . +Match +.RI [ string " + " pmatch->rm_so ", " string " + " pmatch->rm_eo ) +instead of +.RI [ string ", " string " + \fBstrlen\fP(" string )). This allows matching embedded NUL bytes and avoids a .BR strlen (3) -on large strings. -It does not use +on known-length strings. +.I pmatch +must point to a valid readable object. +If any matches are returned +.RB ( REG_NOSUB +wasn't passed to +.BR regcomp (), +the match succeeded, and .I nmatch -on input, and does not change -.B REG_NOTBOL -or -.B REG_NEWLINE -processing. +> 0), they overwrite +.I pmatch +as usual, and the +.B Match offsets +remain relative to +.IR string +(not +.IR string " + " pmatch->rm_so ). This flag is a BSD extension, not present in POSIX. .SS Match offsets Unless -- 2.30.2