Re: [HACKERS] regular expressions from hell

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>>>>> "ocie" == ocie <ocie(at)paracel(dot)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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