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From: Tom Lane <[email protected]>
To: David G Johnston <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Some qualms with the current description of RegExp s,n,w modes.
Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 20:00:45 -0400
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
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David G Johnston <[email protected]> writes:
> I simplified ". and bracket expressions" to "wildcard" and "^ and $" to
> "anchors" though did make use of ^ and $individual quite a bit.  I did not
> formally define these terms in the body either.

Did you mean to attach a proposed doc patch here, or are you just
armwaving about what a patch might look like?

FWIW, I don't agree with using "wildcard" to mean those particular things
(the term is too generic, and there are other regex constructs that
might be thought to be included); although you could probably get away
with using "anchor" this way as long as you define the term at first use.

The text involved here is more or less verbatim from Henry Spencer's
original man page for the regex library, so you're essentially claiming
you know more than the author did about what his code is good for.  Maybe
so, but some examples in support of your thesis would be a good thing.

> Instead of calling these "partial" and "inverse partial" better terms would
> be "newline-sensitive wildcard matching" and "newline-sensitive anchor
> matching".

Agreed that "partial" is not a very good name, but I remain resistant to
"wildcard" here.

> The default mode could be called "newline-sensitive full
> matching".

Or just "newline-sensitive matching" ... does "full" add anything?

			regards, tom lane


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