Possible bug when backreferencing a capturing group

[Quuq]

Hey dudes,

I ran into some unusual behavior today. I'm using a backreferenced capturing group to make sure that a trigger only fires when someone announces their own name in a message. Here's the string I intended to use:

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^(\w+) tells (?:the )?\w+(?::\d)?, '\1 is tanking

That wasn't firing. However, if I shortened it to

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^(\w+) tells (?:the )?\w+(?::\d)?, '\1 is ta

things worked fine.

Is there some hard limit set on the number of characters that can be parsed after a backreference or have I stumbled onto a possible bug?

[Gimagukk]

This is a bug; I'm working on some performance enhancements to regex searches which will correct this when I release them, but for now you putting a pair of parenthesis after the back-reference should work around the issue:

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^(\w+) tells (?:the )?\w+(?::\d)?, '\1() is tanking

[Quuq]

Thanks for the super easy workaround, Gima. I'm looking forward to the lean, mean, regex-parsing (state) machine!