From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at>
Cc: rmzgrimes@gmail.com
Cc: pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Unnecessary use of .* in examples
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2021 10:08:52 -0500
Message-ID: <3335696.1612192132@sss.pgh.pa.us> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <259a5d19b504d7cb9bb2f76ea384a045bcc525dc.camel@cybertec.at>
References: <161215841824.14653.8969016349304314299@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
<259a5d19b504d7cb9bb2f76ea384a045bcc525dc.camel@cybertec.at>
Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at> writes:
> On Mon, 2021-02-01 at 05:46 +0000, PG Doc comments form wrote:
>> In the table for the ~ (and friends) operator, every example has a pointless
>> set of '.*' surrounding the text to be matched. These unnecessary operators
>> add visual clutter making the examples both harder to read and understand,
>> and since they're official examples, they teach bad habits.
> I agree that that is comewhat confusing for people who understand
> regular expressions. On the other hand, the example should show some
> special characters, so that people who don't know regular expressions
> understand that this is more than substring matching.
> Perhaps 'thomas' ~ '^thom' and so on?
There are examples just a bit further down that include special
characters. I agree with the OP that the useless ".*"s add nothing
except confusion as to the semantics; but I don't think we need these
very first examples to use a lot of bells and whistles.
Maybe what would be better is to have an example with embedded .*
such as 'thomas' ~ 't.*m'.
regards, tom lane
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Cc: tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us, laurenz.albe@cybertec.at, rmzgrimes@gmail.com, pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Unnecessary use of .* in examples
In-Reply-To: <3335696.1612192132@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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