Elena Stepanova added a comment - 2014-10-28 22:40 - edited Thinking about it, it sort of makes sense. the second group does not match to an empty value, it is undefined at all; so the ambiguous sequence backslash-backslash-2 defaults to '2'. It's counter-intuitive though. My quick search through PCRE documentation hasn't found anything saying whether it's intentional, so I'm assigning it to bar to confirm (or not). Or, maybe there is a flag that controls it, I haven't found one either.

Julian Ladisch added a comment - 2014-10-29 21:28 Perl and JavaScript also produce the expected result "1 this and that": perl -e '$_="1 foo and bar\n"; s/(\d+) foo and (\d+ )?bar/\1 this and \2that/; print;' document.write( "1 foo and bar" .replace(/(\\d+) foo and (\\d+ )?bar/, "$1 this and $2that" )); http://www.pcre.org/pcre.txt " PCRE_JAVASCRIPT_COMPAT If this option is set […] a back reference to an unset subpattern group matches an empty string (by default this causes the current matching alternative to fail). A pattern such as (\1)(a) succeeds when this option is set (assuming it can find an "a" in the subject), whereas it fails by default, for Perl compatibility.