On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 10:12:32 -0600 Jim Wagner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Thanks very much. I had never been able to make the [[:space:]] > thing work. Now, having just tried it, I find that what I should be > using is [ ], with nothing but a space between the brackets. Glad if I could be of some help. > It's the wording of the Regular Expressions list that's misleading > for people with literal minds like mine. What could they do to > remedy the situation, other than give a full explanation as you've > just done? Regexp is a fairly complex beast and probably quite unnatural unless you have some sort of programming training. In that sense it is questionable how useful regexps are in a generic word processor for the general public, but if you happen to have regexp experience by using tools like perl, awk, grep, lex and alike then you can express quite complex searches efficiently. I think maybe regexp should have a full chapter in the help system for itself. To explain how it works and actually showing the tricks and also the possible pitfalls would require at least a 10-page description, in my opinion, if not more. The regexp description in the grep manpage, which is written for programmers and only lists the actual expression syntax, is about two printed pages long. To make it useful for the non-programmer users you will have to write a rather detailed and lengthy description, with lots of examples. People are not dumb so they could learni it but most descriptions about regexps are written for people with programming background and thus they are full of references to assumed knowledge. So, to be fair to OOo, I think it is not a trivial task at all to explain regexp in a way that people trained in fields completely unrelated to computer science would understand it and be able to use it efficiently. Zoltan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
