Dear list, The following behaviour looks like a bug: grepl("ab{,2}c", "abbbc") # [1] TRUE I would expect either FALSE or an "invalid regex" error. More details can be found in the question I originally asked here: https://stackoverflow.com/q/46999964/6656269 I've also opened an issue on the TRE github: https://github.com/laurikari/tre/issues/62 Best, Etienne