regexp peculiarity

[MarkC Westwood]

Hi

Sorry if this is old hat, but I couldn't find any reference to it in
the mailing list archives.

I'm porting a code from Matlab to Octave.  Making steady progress (for
a Fortran programmer that is) but got puzzled by Octave's reluctance
to process a call to regexp.  Dug deep, read the documentation (Matlab
and Octave) and read the error messages.  It seems that both Matlab
and the Octave documentation make a call to regexp like this:

regexp('string to match against, 'regular expression')

but that the implementation of regexp switches the order of arguments.
The function does not seem to like optional arguments either, such as
'start' in 3rd position.

Have I missed something ?

I'm running Octave 2.1.71 on SuSE Linux 10

Regards
Mark Westwood
MTEM Limited
www.mtem.com