Re: PatternMatching symbol for magic characters :-)

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> This wouldn't quite be the same thing though, would it? I'm not seeing a
> very specific definition of "punctuation" in PIL or the manual, but maybe
> I'm missing it. Implementation detail? But at the very least, '%p' would
> almost certainly match commas, and '%W' would include control characters,
> white space, and other random things, right? Neither of those are quite a
> replacement for the proposed '%m' semantics.

Why would someone need '%m'?  The motivation presented here was to
escape the magic characters.  But Lua ensures that it is safe to escape
any non-alphanumeric character, not only the magic ones. So, you can
escape anything that matches '%p' to have a valid, non-escaped pattern:

   p = string.gsub(p, "%p", "%%%0")

No need for '%m'.

-- Roberto