Thread

Re: [HACKERS] regular expressions from hell

Roland Roberts <roberts@panix.com> — 1998-06-03T02:17:42Z

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>>>>> "ocie" == ocie  <ocie@paracel.com> writes:

    ocie> I think most of this is due to different decisions on what
    ocie> needs to be escaped or not.  For instance, if memory serves,
    ocie> GNU grep treats parens as metacharacters, which must be
    ocie> escaped with a backslash to match parens, while in Emacs,
    ocie> parens match parens and must be escaped to get their
    ocie> meta-character meaning.  Things have gone too far to have
    ocie> one standard now I'm afraid.

Please try to remember that there are historical reasons for some of
this.  grep and egrep behave differently with respect to parentheses;
again, this is historical. 

Personally, I like Perl regexps.  And there is a library for Tcl/Tk
(nre) that implements the same syntax for that language.  But I do
like Emacs' syntax tables and character classes.  I can live with
switching back and forth to some extent....

roland

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-- 
Roland B. Roberts, PhD                  Custom Software Solutions
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