Re: [PATCH take 3 0/4] color-words improvements

From: Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. <bss@iguanasuicide.net>
Date: Jan 16, 2009, 01:42 UTC
Message-ID: <200901151942.55742.bss@iguanasuicide.net>
In-Reply-To: <adf1fd3d0901151610p41930ee2gfc7259aee7e15d73@mail.gmail.com>

On Thursday 15 January 2009, Santi Béjar <santi@agolina.net> wrote about 'Re: [PATCH take 3 0/4] color-words improvements':

>It may be ok and logical, but for me it is not what I want. Mmaybe I
>don't really undestand what I want or is a crazy idea but here it is
>anyway:

The discussion above is mildly theoretical. I don't imagine someone is going to intentionally mark 98% of a file as non-words, which is basically what you are doing with a regex of "a+".

>a) primary words are those with alphanumerics (or a regex)

regex: [[:alnum:]]+

example words: matrix ball I a example non-words: don't haven't

>b) secondary "words" are the other non-whitespaces characters (in this
>case "[]{} and ,"

regex: []{}[,]

example words: [ , } example non-words: [] ball 147

>c) whitespaces are cruft.
>
>(having two regexp to specify what is a words but they cannot mix).

Combine regex with '|' to get: [[:alnum:]]+|[]{}[,]

Show 9 quoted lines

>If everything works as I think (it's late night :-) with the above two
> lines:
>
>matrix[a,b,c]
>matrix{d,b,c}
>
>the word diff would be
>
>matrix<RED>[<GREEN>{<RED>a<GREEN>d<RESET>,b,c<RED>]<GREEN>}<RED>

For this specific case, the regex "[^[:space:]]" by itself should work, although it would end up being a character-by-character diff.

The regex you built from your description "[[:alnum:]]+|[]}{[,]" would also give the same diff. However: -dont +don't gives a word diff of: don't not: don<RED>'<RESET>t because "'" is not recognized as part of any word it is considered ignorable.

There was a patch that included documentation that most users should add "|[^[:space:]]" to the end of their regex, to capture all non-whitespace characters that are not otherwise part of a word as individual, single-character "words".

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