Re: Problem matching on [.]

[Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@...>]

On 15/05/2007 01:16, Nick Gammon wrote:
> Thus, the character "." is defined as a "character class".
>
> Moving onto page 181, the book says:
>
> "A char-set allows you to create your own character classes, combining 
> different character classes and single characters between square brackets".

Indeed, the typology is fuzzy here.

> I acknowledge that changing Lua to do this may break a whole heap of 
> regular expressions currently in use, 

And in classical regular expressions, [] removes magic from _most_ 
special chars (except escape char and chars special to this expression), 
so changing this would be unexpected to most users.

> but perhaps the documentation 
> could be clarified to make it clear that a period inside a char-set is 
> "itself" and not "all characters".

Although the Lua doc. tends to rely on "classical programming knowledge" 
(the principle of least surprise dear to Ruby users), I agree that the 
documentation might be clarified.

--
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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