regexp instantiation behaves weird

actually Raymond, I just uncovered that very item after googling all day I found an Adobe Press publication that actually documents it...(its nowhere in the AS3 doc I could find). To read the specifics check it out:

http://books.google.com/books?id=DT7INNE3ui8C&pg=PA252&lpg=PA252&dq=action+script+escape+slashes+regexp&source=web&ots=K5gKG5Oa9T&sig=QmrZcaDWzl9ysBfFRgQDptBZSlA&hl=en#PPA252,M1

To me this is borderline retarded...treating it one way for the constructor and another for the inline version, especially where regex has so many back slashes inherent to its syntax. Btw, your example is not 'quite' correct for two reasons:

1)if you do use the constructor version you don't use the forward slashes to start and end it, you just include the actual regexp (with all backslashes escaped) in the string variable to the constructor)
2)for some reason that I haven't been able to track down, named back references do not work if you use the string constructor. I was able to get my url regex working by removing all the named back references and escaping all backslashes.

You need to escape all your backslashes when you use the constructor.
i.e
/(?P(\w|[_.\-])+)@(?P((\w|-)+))+\.\w{2,4}+/
would need to be
"/(?P(\\w|[_.\\-])+)@(?P((\\w|-)+))+\\.\\w{2,4}+/"

oh and please read the actual post too and chime in if you have any idea why that might be happening