Dan Mergens wrote:
I would have to defer to the regular expression experts, but VIM does not use
the standard regular expressions that work on the command line, in say, Linux.
Specifically, in the example cited, '/s' was used for whitespace matching,
which is not available in standard regular expressions (c.f. GNU regular
expression implementation).
Regular expression
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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#column-one>, search
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#searchInput>
In computing <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing>, a *regular
expression* (abbreviated as *regexp* or *regex*, with plural forms
*regexps*, *regexes*, or *regexen*) is a string
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_%28computer_science%29> that
describes or matches a set <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set> of
strings, according to certain syntax
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax> rules. Regular expressions are
used by many text editors <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_editor>
and utilities to search and manipulate bodies of text based on certain
patterns. Many programming languages support regular expressions for
string manipulation. For example, Perl
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl> and Tcl
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcl> have a powerful regular expression
engine built directly into their syntax. The set of utilities
(including the editor sed <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed> and the
filter grep <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep>) provided by Unix
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix> distributions were the first to
popularize the concept of regular expressions.
OK: the term "regular expression" is somewhat loose; there is no "strict
regular expression". As Wikipedia mentions, sed and grep were the
first to come up with the concept, and Vim is an extended version of
their concept. Perl, tcl, bash/ksh/zsh/etc, all have their own
variants. None of these are the "defining authority", BTW. Vim and
Perl's regular expressions are amongst the most powerful, although they
differ from one another.
Regards,
Chip Campbell
