On 18/07/15 07:43 PM, Rena wrote:
On Sat, Jul 18, 2015 at 3:26 PM, Tom N Harris
<whoopdedo@whoopdedo.org> wrote:
On Saturday, July 18, 2015 02:45:18 PM Rena wrote:
Well, regardless of whether it's classified as a character class or
a set
or a special case or a fruit or a vegetable, I've many times wished
I could
write a pattern such as "[ ^]%w+[ $]" (match one or more word
characters
bounded by either a space or the start/end of a string). Though ^
already
has a meaning there...
No regex-like implementation I know of works like that, though. I'd
write "(^|
)%w+($| )". Lua doesn't have the alternation operator however. Is
that what's
really being asked for? But disguised as a discussion about
character classes.
--
tom <telliamed@whoopdedo.org>
Alternation would be great, but I think it's been discussed before and
it would add too much complexity to the implementation.
Why not add the whole patterns to... everything?
[(abc)(def)] would match either "abc" or "def"; [(aaa)-(fff)] would
convert a 3 letter sequence to a number and compare it against the
number form of aaa and fff (it gives you more than just a-f 3 times,
you can also match "a¬" (UTF-8; challenge for you: figure out why));
Guess what [a-%%] would do? It would match anything from 'a' to the
'%' sign! (which you can't currently do, because %% is a character
class!)
Way more powerful than Lua patterns and not that hard to write if you
have access to tail calls. I'd take it over Lua patterns anytime, even
if it is clunkier. We also wouldn't need "0-or-more" modifiers as you
would be able to just x?<mod>!
