 |
lua-l archive |
|
|
||
|
Am 05.03.2014 15:24 schröbte Francisco Olarte:
Hi:
Hi!
I'm not discussing which is more useful, more on what is least surprissing. After more than 25 years of working with regular expressions this is the first time I've seen this behaviour. If you resort to mutative operations, anchoring is trivial, just find on substring. Using the customary character for start of string, telling it matches on start of subject string without defining subject string and then making it mach on start of explored region is my problem. I wouldn't care of lua's behaviour if the manual defined subject string. I would care a little less if it used a distinct charset than regular expressions, although I would consider it should be defined. And the surprise problem is not only for people like me who came to lua after using lots of regexes, it will hit people who start in lua and go to another languages too.
It seems that you want to write a pattern matching function that looks atomic on the outside but is implemented as a loop on the inside. I agree that for this specific use case Lua's interpretation of anchors requires special care. I don't find it surprising, though. I knew Perl before I came to Lua, but I can't think of a Perl function that applies a pattern at a given starting index, so I haven't had any expectations for this case. If applying an anchored pattern to somewhere other than index 1 always failed, doing so would be foolish in the first place, and it probably only happens by accident. We also seem to agree that Lua's behavior covers additional use cases. Given all that, the current implementation makes sense. A clarifying note in the reference manual wouldn't hurt, though, and there is a manual update in the pipeline anyway ...
And your sugestion for the "quoty text" is I substitute all my find code with a return nil ? It seems so. Are you suggesting I put a return nil, or that I sanitize every pattern I use to see wether it starts with ^ or what?
Yes, for your current use case (if I guessed correctly) that's one way to go.
Francisco Olarte.
Philipp