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

Hi,

On Wed, 13 Jun 2007, Jeff King wrote:

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

quoted

:-) 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.

Actually, that's funny. Yesterday, I repeated my claim that pcre is 
slow on IRC, and Sam Villain on IRC accused me of trolling. But as you can 
see from my postings on this list ($gmane/41682), you can see that _I_ had 
numbers to back up my claim.

So no, I think pcre is just not worth it.

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. :)

That confirmation is at least some consolation to me :-)

Ciao,
Dscho "who is not here to teach, but to learn"