Re: [PATCH] Interpret :/<pattern> as a regular expression

On Wed, Jun 13, 2007 at 07:54:59PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

:-) Since you seem comfortable with regular expressions, maybe you can 
help me: I am looking for a pattern which matches _any_ character, and one 
which matches only non-newlines, both with and without REG_NEWLINE. Hmm?

Without REG_NEWLINE, any character is just '.', but I think you are
stuck with '[^
]' for non-newlines, since POSIX makes no provisions for quoting the
newline (I just skimmed through POSIX chapter 9, and I didn't see
anything useful).

With REG_NEWLINE, non-newlines is of course '.'. Matching both is tricky
without using extended regular expressions (where you could just do '.|
'). In fact, I have been playing with it for a few minutes and I can't
seem to find a good way, since you really want to represent '.' _inside_
a bracketed alternation sequence. But I don't think there's a character
class for "everything".

I think this would be much easier with pcre, but ISTR some opposition to
that a few months back.

So that's probably not very helpful to you, but at least you have
confirmation from one other person that the answer isn't totally
obvious. :)

-Peff