On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 2:38 PM, John Gage <jsmgage(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> In going through the arcana of string functions, I have come across the
> following series of selects that contain, for me, a mysterious "$re$".
>
> -- return all matches from regexp
> SELECT regexp_matches('foobarbequebaz', $re$(bar)(beque)$re$);
The $re$ is just an arbitrary identifier for a dollar-quoted string
constant. See:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-syntax-lexical.html
Maybe you're on an old version which doesn't support dollar-quoted strings?
On 8.3 for the above query, I get:
SELECT regexp_matches('foobarbequebaz', $re$(bar)(beque)$re$);
regexp_matches
----------------
{bar,beque}
(1 row)
Josh