I am not sure what you are begging for.

On 9. Aug 2011, at 18:55 , Alan Dow wrote:

> At 11:59 AM +0900 9/8/11, Philip Spaelti wrote:
>> On 9. Aug 2011, at 11:01 , Robert B. Waltz wrote:
>> 
>>> I'll tell you why it's a mess: ANY character preceded by \ should be treated as a literal, simply for consistency. I'm pretty sure this does not work, because of the odd results I've been getting. Unfortunately, I haven't yet identified the exact command causing my problems, but it appears that, somehow, a \t is being treated as a literal t!
>> 
>> With all due respect what you are saying here is inconsistent. You want \[char] to be treated as a literal and then you complain when "\t" is treated as a literal "t" ;-)
>> 
>> Of course "\" is the escape character which means that characters following it are usually treated in a non-literal way. Only special characters should (must) be treated literally after a backslash. NWP does indeed do this correctly, to my knowledge. And "\t" should of course be a tab, which it is. (And enclosing it in double quotes, should just cause interpolation, i.e., turn it into an actual tab, so this shouldn't cause a problem.)
> 
> Beg to differ: Nearly all regex engines use a plain dot to mean 'any char except line break', and slash-dot to mean a literal full stop (or if you like, period).

Which is exactly what NWP does too.

> If Nisus have done this deliberately (which I doubt), they are seriously out of step with convention.
> See here: http://www.regular-expressions.info/refflavors.html
> 
> The idea of an escape sequence is implementation-specific. The idea is to escape the usual meaning of a char _within_your_program_environment_.
> That can mean a usually literal char (such as t, b, n, r, s, ...) acquires a special meaning when escaped. And if your program usually applies a special meaning to a char (such as, maybe, <return>, '[', '\', '?' and '.' ) escaping it will return the literal meaning.
> Consistent this has never been (nor could it be).
> 

I am not sure who this little lecture is intended for. I think if you re-read what I wrote, you will see that I already said all that.


Philip Spaelti
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