On Thu, May 05, 2011 at 10:49:23PM +0200, Tony Mechelynck wrote: > I don't really know any other regular expressions than Vim's, because > those are exhaustively documented, in a set of cross-linked helpfiles > which I constantly have at my fingertips.
A ":helpgrep regex" has just now shown me more regex info than I had known was there. Now that I know it exists, I'll have to spend some more time with it. > Sometimes I use regular expressions in less or egrep, and in that > case I try (not too complicated) Vim patterns in the hope that they > will be recognized: they often are, and when they aren't, well, let's > try something else then. I've been slow to realise that Vim users don't necessarily use a variety of posix compliant applications, and so haven't experienced the great productivity benefit of being able to move between them _without_ trial and error, or resort to documentation. > If I were to regularly use some program with a different regexp > dialect, I'd try to find the appropriate documentation, because > trial-and-error may be OK for occasional use, it won't do for serious > systematic programming. Though I haven't found any reference in the help, on the posix-ness of Vim's several regex options, default magic seems close to posix BRE (Perhaps plus some goodies. I haven't checked at all thoroughly.) And \v magic seems close to posix ERE, plus some extra goodies, such as non-greedy matches. When forgetting to prepend \v to every Vim regex, I'll just have to hope that the outcome is obviously wrong, not just invisibly so. (A "set command_line_regex_default = \v" wouldn't impact on script portability, but might be awkward to implement, perhaps.) Erik -- Unix is the IDE. Vim is the editor. (Vale Vi) -- You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
