[R] regexec: Unexpected answer when matching digits

[Stephen Sentoff]

I was trying to use regexec to extract number fields from my data and got an unexpected response.  I can reproduce the issue with this small test case.

regexec("\\d{2,}", "abcd123")

I get a match at position 1, for length 7.  Not what I expected.

I do get the expected response (match at position 5, for length 3) when I do any of the following:

regexec("[0-9]{2,}", "abcd123")
regexec("\\d{1,}", "abcd123")
regexec("\\d+", "abcd123")

I have also verified that regexpr handles this pattern as I expect.

And to add further confusion, this only seems to happen on my Linux machine, not on Windows.

This seems to be an incredibly specific condition.  Anybody know what's going on?

-- 
Steve Sentoff