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

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jun 13, 2007, 22:20 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0706132317240.4059@racer.site>
In-Reply-To: <20070613200011.GA17360@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Hi,

On Wed, 13 Jun 2007, Jeff King wrote:

Show 21 quoted lines

> 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.

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"