I think there are three concerns regarding the substitution of ICU regexp (a
move that I favor):
1. There are whatever the internal usages are within AOO. Those don't need to
be documented externally.
2. There are the places where users may specify regular expressions,
especially in Calc and macro procedures. For those, there needs to be precise
documentation as well as any indication of what the impact is in Release Notes.
3. There are the occurrences of regular expressions in the ODF documents that
are consumed and produced and that are covered in the ODF 1.0/1.1/1.2
specifications. Excluding macros (which are not covered in any version of
ODF), these present potential interoperability issues among producers and
consumers of the same (e.g., OpenOffice) and different lineage.
Here there needs to be enough documentation of what ODF leaves
discretionary so that interoperability can be assured.
So there are these three cases, where perhaps the most urgent documentation is
(2) and then (3) because in the latter case, there may be unexpected or even
un-noticed unexpected results and users won't know what to do. That will not
encourage trust.
- Dennis
-----Original Message-----
From: RGB ES [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2012 05:44
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: i18nregexp replaced with ICU regexp => heads up
2012/1/4 Herbert Duerr <[email protected]>
> On 03.01.2012 19:13, RGB ES wrote:
>
>> Sorry for reactivating this old thread, but I have a question about the
>> new
>> regexp engine: it seems that some regular expressions do not work any more
>> on AOO test builds. For example, on OOo 3.3 you can use
>> \<[0-9]+[,|\.][0-9]*\>
>> to find decimal numbers no matter if the decimal separator is a colon or a
>> dot (the expression will find 125.25 and 1253,586) but this expression do
>> not work on AOO builds.
>>
>
> Following up myself, AOO will both find strings like "<125.25>" and
> "<1253,586>" for the example regexp you provided, but it will not find
> "125.25" and "1253,586".
>
> http://www.regular-**expressions.info/refflavors.**html<http://www.regular-expressions.info/refflavors.html>mentions
> the \< and \> that are used in your regexp example as non-standard
> extensions to the syntax. With using the new engine we are closer to the
> reference
> http://www.regular-**expressions.info/reference.**html<http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html>
>
> Herbert
>
Thanks! I think we will need to make more clear to the users this change:
many old documents with macros that rely on the old syntax will not work on
AOO 3.4.
Also, I think I found a problem. Suppose you have a text like "He heard
quiet quiet steps". By using a regexp like
(\w+) \1\b
(notice the space before the \1) you'll find the repeated word without
problems, but if you use $1 on "Replace with" instead of obtaining "He
heard quiet steps" you get "He heard steps", with two spaces between
"heard" and "steps": the reference is not inserted!
Ricardo
