Message-ID: <a482077b9ae59e23da435ac315320ac1cb048088.camel@cybertec.at>
Subject: Re: Unnecessary use of .* in examples
From: Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: rmzgrimes@gmail.com, pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org
Date: Tue, 02 Feb 2021 10:54:58 +0100
In-Reply-To: <3335696.1612192132@sss.pgh.pa.us>
References: <161215841824.14653.8969016349304314299@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
	 <259a5d19b504d7cb9bb2f76ea384a045bcc525dc.camel@cybertec.at>
	 <3335696.1612192132@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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On Mon, 2021-02-01 at 10:08 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> > 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'.

I agree, and thanks for improving it in
https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=9522085ac917af66dba29939af328ae67300f10a

Yours,
Laurenz Albe