Linda Walsh wrote:
Why do (or should) double quotes lose their normal meaning inside
double brackets?
After initialĺy introducing =~, Chet made it consistent with =/== in a
second version, means: =/== doesn't do pattern matching for parts inside
quotes, =~ doesn't du regexp matching for parts inside quotes.
My personal opinion is: This makes sense. Can't speak for others.
That's also the reason you have 2 different =~ behaviours. Please,
whatever the reasonable result of this discussion is, do not make up yet
the next =~ variant that's incompatible with the others ;)
I would like to see double quotes and single quotes NOT disable
RE functionality when used with =~. I would like to suggest that to
disable RE functionality, that the user use '==', instead.
== is the same as =, my suggestion is to NOT touch that. It would be
even better to introduce a new operator instead of touching =~ (see
above) or the pattern matchers. Maybe you don't care for compatiblity, I
do, since I'm operating the same scripts on systems with Bash 2.05b to
the newest 4.x without changes - so please don't suggest anything that
will break compatiblity with very common things that were there for ages
(like the pattern matchers in the conditional expression).
Wouldn't it be reasonable to do RE matching when one does =~ and not
do it when one uses ==?
For ==, see above. For the behaviour of =~: It was adjusted in 3.2 to be
consistent with =/==. As far as I remember there was a lot of
discussion, maybe Chet can say something about it.
The whole point of the =~ was to allow regex matching. If you don't
want it, why would you have to create special, asymmetric functionality
for quotes?
I don't really see your problem with regex matching at the moment, maybe
I misunderstand you.
Maybe you think this means you can not match quotes in a regex at all,
this would be totally wrong, of course you can. Just with a small syntax
speciality (like for pattern matching, too).
The "portable" way for =~ in Bash is putting the RE into a variable,
anyways. Not nice. Such things come up when you break compatiblity (see
above, changed between 3.0 and 3.2).
Regards,
Jan
