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Bug introduced in 6.0 or earlier and fixed in 10.1.0

The following code crashes my Mathematica kernel (v9, MacOS):

s = StringJoin[ConstantArray["65 H Isotropic = 27.4022 Anisotropy = 4.3297\n", 400]];
StringCases[s, (Except["\n"]..~~"\n")..];

Is this a known problem? Am I using string patterns in a wrong way?

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  • $\begingroup$ I can reproduce this in MMA9 och MMA10 on OS X. $\endgroup$
    – C. E.
    Aug 18, 2014 at 11:08
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    $\begingroup$ No problem with version 10 on Windows 7 $\endgroup$
    – Simon Woods
    Aug 18, 2014 at 11:35
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    $\begingroup$ Even if you are using string patterns incorrectly, you shouldn't get a kernel crash. $\endgroup$
    – m_goldberg
    Aug 18, 2014 at 11:46
  • $\begingroup$ It crashes on Linux v8 as well. $\endgroup$
    – Öskå
    Aug 18, 2014 at 11:54
  • $\begingroup$ Can reproduce on v10 Linux x64. $\endgroup$
    – mfvonh
    Aug 18, 2014 at 13:03

1 Answer 1

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Is your StringCases expression intended to recover the 400 individual strings (without their terminating new-lines) that were joined to form s? If so, your pattern should have been

ss2 = StringCases[s, Except["\n"] ..];

although I suggest 

ss3 = StringSplit[s, "\n"];

would have been a better way to do it.

Nevertheless, as I wrote in a comment to your question, what you evaluated should not have crashed the kernel, because, ideally, the kernel should never crash.

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  • $\begingroup$ The expression is a minimum working example derived from a more complicated string pattern used in parsing part of the output of a quantum chemistry program. The original input indeed had a header followed by multiple data lines followed by footer format. I was interested in one number in each line and a fast solution as I have to parse many of these files. Ideally I wanted a single pattern returning these numbers. The problem also seems a matter of input size: If you replace 400 by 100 in my example, evaluation goes through. $\endgroup$
    – mrupp
    Aug 18, 2014 at 14:10
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    $\begingroup$ @mrupp. That it is a matter of input size is no surprise. Many kernel crashes are data size dependent. $\endgroup$
    – m_goldberg
    Aug 18, 2014 at 14:13

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